Hazel K. Bell - Indexing Biographies and Other Stories of Human Lives

Indexing Biographies
and Other Stories of Human Lives

Indexing Biographies
and Other Stories of Human Lives
Fourth edition
Hazel K. Bell
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PR ESS

First edition published 1992
Second edition published 1998
Th ird edition published 2004
Th is fourth edition published 2020 by

Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU, UK
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Published in partnership with the Society of Indexers
Copyright © 2020 Hazel K. Bell
The right of Hazel K. Bell to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright
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stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
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ISBN 978-1-78962-162-4 (limp)
eISBN 978-1-78962-745-9
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1. Narrative texts and stories of lives 1

‘Soft’ texts 1
The narrative form 2
Sensitive content 3
History 4
Biography 5
Autobiography 8
Political memoirs 9
Diaries 10
Letters 12
2. The great and good 17

Indexing masterpieces 17
Award winners 18
Other good ’uns 24
3. First read your book 29

Analysis and annotation 31
Coverage 33
4. Naming names 35
Alternative forms 35
John Brown, meet John Brown 38
Who are all these people? 38
Errors and inconsistencies 40
Lord, My 41
Pseudonyms 41
Indexing biographies
5. Coming to terms: subheadings 44

Qualities to aim for 46
Language fit for literature 48
And … 49
6. The perils of partiality 51

Don’t show your feelings 51
Putting it nicely 54
Linguistic limitation 55
What-d’you-call-her? 55
The constraint of standardization 58
‘Have you stopped beating your wife …?’ 59
7. All in order: a proper arrangement 60

Alphabetization 60
Subheadings 61
Page order 61
Chronology observed 63
The alphabetical way 66
8. Theme by theme 68
Examples of paragraphed subheadings 69
Tracing the themes 73
9. Mighty main characters 75

Leave it out? 75
Hero-treatment 79
10. The works 85

Listing volumes 85
Titles 85
Characters 88
Letters 89
11. Just mentioning … 90
vi
Contents
12. Presentation and layout 96

Prefatory notes 96
Run-on style 97
Sub-subheadings 98
Indented style 99
Typographical devices 99
13. The user 106

Is that me …? 107
14. Fiction 109

Should fiction be indexed? 109
The indexer as literary critic 111
Indexing the fiction of A. S. Byatt 114
Novels published with indexes 115
References 121
Index 129
vii
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge with thanks permission granted by all the authors

of articles or publishers of indexes quoted herein to reproduce those
passages, and by Peters, Fraser and Dunlop in respect of extracts from
the index to Pepys’ diary.
Excerpts from Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell, copyright
1949 by Harcourt Brace & Company and renewed 1977 by Sonia
Brownell Orwell, reprinted by permission of the publisher, of Mark
Hamilton, the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell
Orwell, and Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.
viii
1. Narrative texts
and stories of lives
‘Soft’ texts
Stories of human lives are recounted in histories, biographies, autobiog-
raphies, diaries – also in fiction; always in narrative form, distinct from
documentary texts. Such stories bring particular problems for indexers,
with regard both to form and content.
The indexer of the humanities – literary or biographical works; books
basically about people and their personal experiences – is often dealing
with accounts of personal relationships and emotions rather than with
documentary facts: what I would call ‘soft texts’, expressed in flexible,
literary language. The indexer of these has to make assessments of the
selection of items to index, and the terms in which to express them, on
the basis of subjective value judgement, being, as Douglas Matthews puts
it, ‘in a sense, an interpreter, not just a reporter of the text’ (Matthews,
personal communication, 1991).
Human lives are generally not lived in accordance with strict
principles, and irregularities in lives that are being indexed must be met
by flexible indexing practice, with index entries selected not uniformly
according to specifiable categories, but by individual degree of signif-
icance, as assessed by the indexer, who is gauging the calibre of references
rather than their kind (Bell, 1991a, b). Each biography tells a unique
story: Alain de Botton refers to ‘the extraordinariness of any life, a
singularity’ (de Botton, 1995).
What I call ‘soft’ texts have been distinguished from documentary
ones previously under other terms. Most largely, they reflect the difference
drawn by Richard Abel between information (dry) and knowledge (soft):
The way in which knowledge, once created, is stored and retrieved
distinguishes this form of intellectual activity from that of the
1
discovery of information. The latter is readily stored, not only in

journal papers, but also in computer databases. Information can
be stored in these ways due to its discrete, particular, specific
and quantitative qualities. Knowledge, by contrast, is only partly
quantitative. It is discursive, general and broad-ranging with
only very indistinct boundaries. (Abel, 1991)
The narrative form

The narrative (historical) form was differentiated from that of
‘documentary texts’ by Cecelia Wittmann (Wittmann, 1990). By
documentary texts we understand collections of discrete, self-contained
units: articles, essays, lectures, brochures, works, documents in general,
which usually may be indexed item by item. Narrative texts, by contrast,
sustain their threads continuously through the whole work, not broken
into separate units, but extending through entire volumes or sequences of
volumes. Chapter endings are pauses in a continuing story, not changes
of topic. Whole narrative works contain recurrent characters and themes
whose constant development must be kept in mind throughout the
whole, not just dealt with and dismissed from the sequence.
The extended continuity of a complete narrative entails large numbers
of references building up for the major topics, so that subdivision
and specification of many references will become necessary: narrative
indexers must analyse and rephrase their texts closely. Hans Wellisch
describes narrative indexing as ‘providing the user with the context of
an indexed item’ (Wellisch, 1991). These present the indexer of soft texts
with the problem of sustained continuity, the constant development of
characters and themes. Much subdivision and specification will become
necessary, with the devising of appropriate subheadings.
Gordon Carey, the first President of the Society of Indexers, who
compiled the indexes of over sixty books, including the autobiographies
of Lords Attlee, Brabazon, Ismay and Maugham, and a biography of Lord
Haldane, wrote, ‘The compilation of entries loaded with subheadings
is, to my mind, the task that calls for the indexer’s highest skill of all’
(Carey, 1961).
2
Narrative texts and stories of lives
As narrative texts deal with human lives, which have never been
standardized, there are few rules and standards specifically for indexing
these; such indexing must be individual and subjective.
Sensitive content
The indexer of human lives may also have particular problems to cope
with regarding the matter in hand, contending with sensitive humani-
tarian aspects of anatomizing psyche. We may feel guilty of invading
privacy, or causing distress by what we draw attention to. Roger Cooper’s
book about his experiences as a hostage in Lebanon, Death plus ten years,
was published by HarperCollins without an index. Asked to explain the
lack, they replied:
We took the deliberate decision not to include an index for
the simple reason that the book is a personal account of a very
harrowing experience, and that, as such, it becomes somewhat
otiose to have to include an enormous entry detailing Roger’s
every thought or action. It’s the kind of book which deserves
re-reading, in its entirety perhaps. (personal communication)
Indexers may still have to bite the sensitive bullet. The personal
accounts of their hostage experiences by John McCarthy, Terry
Anderson, and Terry Waite all appeared with detailed indexes. Indexing
a history of the Resistance movement in World War II, based on newly
accessible records, I was horribly aware that the relatives of Gestapo
victims might learn here for the first time the exact, awful details of
their fates. Indexing the love letters of a mystic poet, intended for no
third eye, let alone publication, made me feel a most intrusive voyeur
as I sought to reduce outpourings of spiritual ecstasy to precise terms
(Bushrui, 1980).
Sometimes it seems cruel to deal a double blow, reinforcing in the
index the exposure or censure of folly or wrongdoing in the text. We
worry too as to whether we may be held guilty as accessories to libel in
indicating where scurrilous allegations are to be found. Envying both
the impersonality and standardization of documentary indexing, the
soft indexers of human lives search their souls as well as their thesauri.
3
We who take human lives in our hands, in the words of Paul Barnett,
‘beyond the appendix with gun and camera’ (Barnett, 1983), have heavy
responsibilities as well as a heavy task.
History
Histories are usually narrative texts, with biographies occurring within
them.
Indexers of histories have certain advantages over the indexers of
biographies. Much of their subject in hand – the period, its events, and
public figures – will be known to them: subject expertise applies here.
They are also able to imply much in a simple date specification (such as
1066 or 1914–18) without having to explain its significance to the text
in a gloss. For events that have been frequently recounted – and indexed
– standard descriptive labels may well have become established that can
be used as subheadings, so there are published precedents available to
consult.
Examining histories indexed by their authors, Piggott suggested
criteria for indexers of histories:
Both our historians thought chronologically, were scrupu-
lously exact in presenting names and in distinguishing between
separate instances of the same phenomenon […] both strove to
fulfill the requirements of scholarship in accurate statement and
citation. (Piggott, 1991)
The indexing of local and family history has particular requirements, as
claimed by Bob Trubshaw:
Whereas in most books there would be little point in indexing
minor mentions of individuals, buildings and street names, this
would be very frustrating for local and family history researchers
because it is just such ‘trivial’ aspects that they are often most
keen to track down, or which are the only clues to locating more
relevant information. (Trubshaw, 2005)
4
Articles on the indexing of narrative history that have appeared in

The Indexer are:
Bias in indexing [on Laurence Echard/John Oldmixon]. Margaret
Anderson. 9(1), 27–30
Twenty-five years of history indexing: a practitioner’s report.
E. H. Boehm. 11(1), 33–42
The indexing work of Family History Societies. J. S. W. Gibson. 13(2),
83–5
Indexes for local and family history: a user’s view. John Chandler.
13(4), 223–7
Indexing ancient history. R. D. Rodriguez. 14(3), 207–8
User approaches to indexes [family history]. Jean Stirk. 16(2), 75–8
Observations on the indexing of history: the example of the Journal of
American History. M. B. Gilmore. 16(3), 159–62
Authors as their own indexers [Elizabethan England]. Mary Piggott.
17(3), 161–6
‘Discursive, dispersed, heterogeneous’: indexing Seven pillars of
wisdom. Hazel K. Bell. 24(1), 9–11
‘A funny lot’: indexing and local history books. Bob Trubshaw. 24(4),
184–5
Christian history: 3,000 years and an author’s indexing thereof.
Diarmaid MacCulloch. 28(2), 108–9
History indexes reviewed. Catherine Sassen. 31(3), 105–9
Working with Hannibal and the Folio Society. Gerard M-F. Hill. 31(4),
173
So many words: indexing oral history. Mary Newberry et al. 34(4),
144–7
Biography
Philip Hensher provides us with a useful definition of an index to a
biography (Hensher, 2004):
If a biography is a reduction of a life’s experiences to the span of
a single volume, then the index is a further reduction, indicating
5
the general characteristics, of recurrent themes, of the bare truth

which a book cloaks in prose.
Richard Abel may gladden our hearts with:
Biographies and autobiographies, when composed, published
and sold in keeping with the traditional canons of sound
judgement, have been, and remain, among the crown jewels of
the book trade. (Abel, 1993)
And ‘[t]he fascination of reading biographies is irresistible’, wrote
Virginia Woolf (Woolf, 1932). But less respect is paid to their indexes.
At the Society of Indexers’ conference in Cheltenham, 1988, a voice
was raised to declare scornfully in a discussion session, ‘Surely anyone
can index a biography!’. Contemptuously addressing those indexers he
regarded as lacking professionalism, John Simkin wrote in The Indexer:
‘If all you’ve ever bothered to learn is how to knock off an index to a
book on some well-known topic – gardening, biography, cookery…’
(Simkin, 1997). Such disparagements are not uncommon: alas, indexing
biographies is not a subject specialism, and lacks the respect accorded
those.
Special subjects consist of bodies of lore of academic disciplines,
established facts. They may be provided with standardized terminology
and formalized structure for their texts. Biographies involve none of
these, being just books about people, the lives they lead, their various
activities and relationships, told in an author’s own way. They are
non-standardized.
Indexers are frequently cautioned that they should never index
a book on a subject not within their specialist knowledge. Indexers
of biographies, though, are all too often called upon to do just that.
Biographies may be the first on their newly discovered or newly famed
subjects, may contain whole new areas of information, or aim to give
new knowledge about the lives of their subjects. The main characters
are likely to live among people not well known. No one would claim
detailed knowledge of all lives lived and likely to be recorded in print:
biographical indexers may well be working on unfamiliar topics,
making no claim to expertise. Biography is a genre, not a subject
specialism.
6
However, subject specialisms of several sorts may yet come to be

desired, as our heroes enter and practise their various careers. I have
undertaken the indexing of biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and of
Lawrence of Arabia. What subject specialist could one recommend
to cover the whole extraordinary career of either of those polymaths?
Contrariwise, several scientific indexers have told me how, when they
were asked to index biographies of their disciplines’ heroes, they found
themselves at a loss as to how to proceed. Caroline Barlow riposted
to Simkins’ sneer quoted above, ‘As a scientist I usually steer clear
of biographies for the reason that you don’t know what subject range
(usually large) they will contain’ (Barlow, 1998).
Disregarded indexers of biographies may, however, relish Giles
Gordon’s description of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann as ‘846-page
(including notes and index, essential to any self-regarding biographer)’
(Gordon, 1993). Less laudable advocacy for biographical indexes:
There have been few biographies in the past half-century that have
come to fewer than 600 pages […] For an ordinary newspaper
reviewer, for instance, it means that a biography should have
a good index to help him skip perhaps half a thousand pages.
Biography, especially governance biography, now has to be
designed for skippage. (Whittemore, 1999)
Certainly, any account of an entire life may grow mighty long,
extending through several volumes. Charles Moore’s Margaret Thatcher:
the authorised biography, vol. 1 alone (Penguin, 2013) was hailed by
a reviewer as ‘a doorstop biography’ (Johnson, 2014). Brian Sewell,
reviewing Van Gogh: the life, by S. Naifeh and G. White Smith (Profile,
2011) with 912 pp., commented: ‘It is a worthy but not worthwhile
effort, for who now has the time to read a thousand pages crammed with
uncomfortably small print? […] its index is invaluable for finding odd
facts not easily discoverable elsewhere’ (Sewell, 2012).
Articles on the general indexing of biographies that have appeared

in The Indexer are:
No room at the top. G. V. Carey. 2(4), 120–3
7
Indexing biographies: lives do bring their problems. Hazel K. Bell.

16(3), 168–72
Indexing biographies: the main character. Hazel K. Bell. 17(1), 43–4
Biographies as soft, narrative texts. Hazel K. Bell. 30(3), 1414–16
Dramatis personae. Madeleine Davis. 30(3), 132–5
An indexer’s life of Johnson. Christopher Phipps. 30(3), 114–19
Biography indexes reviewed. Catherine Sassen. 30(3), 136–40
A list of literary figures featured in The Indexer can be found in

‘Contents by category’ on its website, at https://www.theindexer.org/
indexes/contents-by-category/.
Autobiography
Indexers of autobiographies may have an easier task than those indexing
third-person accounts of others’ lives. In ‘A sketch of the past’ Virginia
Woolf noticed how often memoirs ‘leave out the person to whom
things happened’, since events are easier to describe than the person
they happen to (Woolf, 1939). As G. V. Carey wrote of indexing a
volume of memoirs, ‘Not unnaturally, the author did not expatiate on
his own personality’ (Carey, 1961). And how often is the author of an
autobiography also its indexer? Indexing the main character, oneself, in
a first-person narrative would seem a Lacanian distinction of Self and
Other. The indication of much character analysis may be spared the
indexer of autobiography.
Treatment of the main character in a biography constitutes one of
the main problems of its indexing (see chapter 9), but the narrators of
texts themselves rarely occupy the foreground, and where the narrator
is also the protagonist they may appear less prominent, their own
activities and characteristics less demanding of constant specification.
Autobiographers, unless unduly egotistical, tend to write more of those
they observe and encounter than of themselves. (For an egotistical
example, see the eulogistic subheadings in the entry for Joseph Bonanno
in his autobiography – discussed in Chapter 6.)
Autobiography may take several forms, including memoirs, journals,
and diaries.
8
Political memoirs
Alan Walker observes:
Two features make ‘political memoirs’ a special class of writing:
that they are autobiography rather than biography, and that they
are a species of political discourse. (Walker, 2012b)
Impartiality (see chapter 6) is surely most necessary here. Staunch
Whig Lord Macaulay famously realised this, crying ‘Let no damned Tory
index my book!’. But hostility appears in political memoirs nevertheless.
The authors of these two seem to come to virtual blows in their indexes:
I turn to the index – which, as everyone knows, is the only part
of books by politicians anyone ever reads with interest – of John
Redwood’s Singing the Blues: The Once and Future Conservatives.
Major, John, begins a hefty section, characteristic equivocation
of; and difficulties with election promises; discourages sensible
debate in Cabinet; […] foolish decisions of; lets down people;
makes claims in memoirs; makes right decision to resign; […]
takes wrong course of action over Maastrich. Oh dear. Honi
soit qui mal y pense, pointy ears. When we turn to the index of
Mr Major’s autobiography, what do we find? Redwood, John:
Citizen’s Charter; assumed to be disloyal. (The Questing Vole,
The Spectator, 16 October 2004)
The characters featured in such memoirs may well still be living, and
constitute an eager – or anxious – potential readership. Walker records
that the launch of John Howard: Lazarus rising (HarperCollins Sydney,
2010), a political autobiography that he indexed, ‘was like a walking
index’ (Walker, 2012a).
But the very relevance of the political memoir to so many potential
readers may even lead to publication sans index. In 2004 The Indexer
featured ‘the Washington read’, quoting Richard Ben Cramer explaining
why his 1000-page account of the 1988 US presidential campaign, What
it takes: the way to the White House (Vintage Books, 1992) was published
without an index (Fox, 2013):
For years I watched all these Washington jerks, all these Capitol
Hill, executive-branch, agency wise guys and reporters go into,
9
say, [a] bookstore, take a political book off the shelf, look up their
names, glance at the page and put the book back. Washington
reads by index, and I wanted those people to read the damn thing.
Articles on the indexing of autobiographies that have appeared in

The Indexer are:
No room at the top [includes memoirs of Lord Ismay]. G. V. Carey.
2(4), 120–3
Misrepresentation – passim [Joseph Bonanno]. Hazel K. Bell. 14(1), 56
Authors as their own indexers [1100 miles with Monty]. Mary Piggott.
17(3), 161–6
The ‘Washington read’ and the ‘Clindex’. Christine Shuttleworth. 24(2), 61
The Blair Index Project. Christine Shuttleworth. 28(4), 175
Political memoirs: an international comparison of indexing styles. Alan
Walker. 30(2), 66–75
Indexing political memoirs: neutrality and partiality. Alan Walker. 30(3),
125–30
Diaries
Karl Heumann reported that of his collection of 491 diaries and journals,
217 (44%) lacked an index. He claimed, ‘a printed diary or journal
without a proper index is a maimed thing and is not able to serve its full
purpose even on a first reading’ (Heumann, 1970).
According to Simon Brett, a diary may fulfil a variety of roles (Brett,
1987):
It can be used to colour reality or to vent spleen. It can be a
bald record of facts or a Gothic monument of prose. It can
chart the conquests of a libertine or the seesawing emotions
of a depressive. It can chronicle the aspirations of youth and
the disillusionments of age. For a painter it can be a detailed
notebook, for a writer an experimental canvas.
Diaries may pose peculiar difficulties for the indexer. Diary entries
are more casually made than the writing of a formal autobiography, and
10
seem to offer indexers less opportunity for the devising of meaningful

subheadings. Not having been designed as narrative wholes for other
readers, they are unlikely to introduce and explain their recurrent
characters, who will probably have large numbers of minor, background
references – in lists of those making up groups and parties, for example.
Perhaps passim may be allowable for diaries, indicating minor
mentions over a period of consecutive days.
Indexes to diaries tend to be fully glossed, to make up for the lack of
initial description, and to have strings of page references not deserving
special subheadings. The index to the published version of the diary
of Barbara Pym is headed ‘Index/Glossary’ (Pym, 1985). The index to
Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Diaries includes these entries with only one page
reference each (Asquith, 1968):
Benson, Constance (d. 1946; wife of Frank Benson, the actor-
manager who was knighted in 1916, but herself a somewhat
indifferent performer), 259
Broughton, Rhoda (1840–1920: novelist, author of Not wisely
but too well pub. 1867, and others. Originally considered
‘advanced’ and shocking, she had been overtaken by time
and respectability), 324
The entry for Cliffe, Polly, has ten lines of text and four lines of
undifferentiated page numbers; that for McInnes, (Mrs) Angela has 15
lines of text with two page numbers. The index includes a typographic
novelty in one entry:
Douglas, Lord Alfred (1870–1945: son of the 8th Marquess of
Queensberry. His relationship with Lady Cynthia was as
follows: [a small family tree is reproduced in the index at this
point]
Hugh Muir observes of Alastair Campbell’s diaries (Arrow, 2012):
from [the index] you get an instant view of Alastair’s impatience
with Clare Short. ‘Ghastly to deal with’, 89; ridiculous in Cabinet,
256; spills tea over new Cabinet Secretary, 307; ‘totally ridiculous’,
331; interruptions worse than usual, 348; exacerbates problems,
544, 548, 550.’ The text is superfluous really. (Muir, 2012)
11
Much praise has been accorded to the indexes to E. S. de Beer’s

edition of John Evelyn’s Diary (in six volumes), and indexes to the diaries
of Samuel Pepys and William Gladstone have won the Wheatley Medal
– see below, chapter 2.
Articles on the indexing of diaries that have appeared in The Indexer

are:
Indexing Pepys’s diary. Robert and Rosalind Latham. 12(1), 34–5
‘The index to the definitive Pepys’. Robert Latham. 14(2), 88–90
‘Thankless task’ accomplished (for Barbara Pym). Hazel K. Bell.
14(3), 189
A glossy index (Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Diaries). Hazel K. Bell. 18(1),
47
Indexing Gladstone: from 5 x 3” cards to computer and database.
H. C. G. Matthew. 19(4), 257–64
Indexing Wesley’s journals and diaries. John A. Vickers. 25(1), 9–11
‘And so to bed’: the index to The diary of Samuel Pepys. Fred Leise.
29(1), 4–11
Letters
Although written in discrete, not narrative form, and ‘for the moment;
their function is individual, not sequential or cumulative; they normally
involve a variety of recipients’ (Barnes, 2000), sequences of letters
may acquire a sense of continuity, developing events and lives. Julian
Barnes, indeed, suggests, in the case of Gustave Flaubert, that ‘the
Correspondance has always added up to Flaubert’s best biography’,
commenting, ‘This is the advantage of letters over biography: letters
exist in real time. We read them at about the speed at which they were
written. Biography gives us the crane-shot, the time-elision, the astute
selectivity’ (Barnes, 2000). It is therefore appropriate to consider the
indexing of collections of letters (which may extend through several
volumes), and its peculiar difficulties, here.
The letters of authors may have a triple manifestation: as literary
works themselves, published or fit to be published; aspects of
12
relationships described in the biography; and sources drawn on and

cited by the biographer.
Books are usually written deliberately for publication – addressed
to, structured and worded for, the general reader. Letters, though, are
intended only for their first recipients, addressed deliberately to them,
and so may well include references that third parties will not understand.
Their sequence is chronological but not continuous; as narrative it may
appear jerky, with omissions and perplexing references. In A. S. Byatt’s
novel, Possession, a character reflects: ‘Letters […] are a form of narrative
that envisages no outcome, no closure. […] Letters tell no story, because
they do not know, from line to line, where they are going’ (Byatt, 1990).
As with diaries, themes will be dispersed in small bits, with reiterated
minor references to people, causing strings of minor references to the
same topics.
The dates at which people’s names may be changed, or titles bestowed,
cause difficulty for the indexer of volumes of letters. Jeremy Wilson, truly
punctilious in matters of detail and authenticity, in his annotations to
volumes of letters of T. E. Lawrence (Castle Press) ‘[tried] to ensure that
the notes give the titles of people as they were at the time the letter was
written’. He wanted the volumes’ indexes to do the same, but realized that
this would cause trouble in the cases where people were ennobled during
Lawrence’s lifetime, especially in the proposed cumulative index for all
Castle Press works concerning Lawrence. He suggested that the index
should contain entries such as ‘ Trenchard, Hugh (kt 1928)’ (Wilson,
personal communication, 2000).
Douglas Matthews addressed a Society of Indexers conference on
‘the pleasures and pride derived from indexing volumes of published
letters, and the particular challenges of the genre’ (Matthews, 2001). He
spoke of collections of letters as ‘discrete and separate, cast in a variety
of voices’, liable to lay the indexer open to feelings of ‘intrusiveness and
embarrassment’; of the use of intimate names in correspondence; the
possibility of a final cumulation of volume indexes; and the likelihood
of having two related texts to cope with in indexing: the letters
themselves, and the editor’s notes and comments. Special techniques
that he advocated were making a preliminary index of correspondents,
and typographical distinction between correspondents in the general
index and as recipients.
13
Indexes to volumes of letters have received high praise. The

five-volume (3002-page) index to the 43 volumes of The Yale edition of
Horace Walpole’s correspondence (Oxford University Press, 1937–83),
compiled by Warren Hunting Smith with three assistants, was reviewed
thus in the Times Literary Supplement:
The index is as meticulously thorough as human minds can
contrive […] All the letters are sifted and their contents classified
in categories of astonishing detail. […] typographical opulence,
perhaps unique among indexes, helps to speed the skimming
eye. […] exemplary features […] This great edition has been
called encyclopaedic. Its index justifies that accolade. (Halsband,
1983)
Matthews’ view of this index is in accordance. He writes, ‘the
cumulation stands by itself as a mighty accomplishment, and daunting
to most of us. […] This mighty work is one of elegant simplicity […]
Typographically it is very pleasing’ (2001).
Matthews had many complimentary things to say too of James
Thornton’s indexes to Volume 2 (1840–1) of The letters of Charles Dickens
(Clarendon Press, 1969; winner of the Wheatley Medal for that year),
writing: ‘The system he created is admirable, and he set high standards
for treating these marvellous and extensive letters. There is a range of
typographical devices for particular features’ (Matthews, 2001).
G. Norman Knight also praised Thornton’s indexes, singling out
what he deemed ‘a very useful innovation’ (Knight, 1970):
In a straight run of page numbers he would frequently identify
a reference by inserting descriptive words, often quoted, in
brackets after the page number; thus, under A merica: Other
references, we have at the end: also 87n, 104n, 108 (‘great
country’), 143 (‘new World’), 405n, 429n
Thornton himself wrote of R. W. Chapman’s index to his edition of
Samuel Johnson’s Letters:
Chapman champions the multiple index. [His] edition of
Johnson’s Letters in three volumes has seven classified indexes,
which together occupy 135 pages of Volume III. He used his
14
indexes as a means of conveying to the reader a good deal of

information of a kind that in other editions would find its way
into the introduction or into an introductory note. The multiple
index in this instance is therefore a valuable editorial device.
(Thornton, 1968)
In both 2001 and 2002, the American Society of Indexers /
H. W. Wilson Company Award, ‘established to honor excellence in
indexing [… and] to provide and publicize models of excellence in
indexing’ (American Society for Indexing) was awarded to indexers of
collections of letters.
The 2001 award went to Ronald M. Gephart and Paul H. Smith
for their cumulative index to Letters of delegates to Congress, 1774–1789
(Library of Congress, 2000). The judging committee found that ‘the
cumulative index provides narrative analysis for the letters and makes the
letters and history within accessible. As one judge said, “The index is the
narrative”’ (Wyman, 2001).
In 2002 the ASI award was won by Margie Towery for her cumulative
index to The Letters of Matthew Arnold (six volumes; University Press of
Virginia). The committee:
was impressed by the thoroughness of the index and its
consequent usefulness to the scholars who are its primary
audience. Towery’s painstaking approach can be seen in the
very precise page ranges given for each letter and the lists
of ‘mentioneds’, the concise but elegant distinctions made
between people with the same name, and the brief but clear
analysis of the entries. The relevance and parallelism of the
subheadings and the grammatical relationship between the
subheads and the main headings are also outstanding. ‘The
language’, as committee member Laura Gottlieb put it, ‘is
lovely’. All in all, the committee felt that this index not only
provides excellent access to Arnold’s letters, but stands as a
shining example for anyone undertaking a similar project in
the future’. (M. Anderson, 2002)
The ISC/SCI Ewart-Daveluy Award for Indexing Excellence was
presented in 2016 to Mary Newberry for her index to the two-volume,
15
1,150-page, Letterbooks of John Evelyn, edited by Douglas D. C. Chambers

and David Galbraith (University of Toronto Press). As the citation
explains:
Making this 1,150 letterbook material accessible to scholars was
the job of the indexer, but it was not an easy job. The sheer volume
of the material was one issue; another was the archaic diction and
writing style of the seventeenth century. A third was the need to
serve the scholars who were undoubtedly already familiar with
de Beer’s extensive index created for the 1955 publication of
Evelyn’s diaries and would expect some correlation, while also
serving modern indexing standards and user expectations. Mary
created a comprehensive index that demonstrates outstanding
indexing expertise, analytical competence and index design
skill. More than that, it exemplifies the index as a work of art.
(Indexing society awards, 2016)
Articles on indexing letters that have appeared in The Indexer are:

How I indexed Dickens’s letters. J. Thornton. 4(4), 119–22
On editing and indexing a series of letters [of Sir Robert Hart].
K. F. Bruner. 14(1), 42–6
‘A book very much to your credit’: the index to the private edition of
Boswell’s Papers. Judy Batchelor. 14(2), 114
The Burney papers – or, where does an index begin? Althea Douglas,
14(4), 241–8
Indexing published letters. Douglas Matthews. 22(3), 135–41
After the Prize: indexing at the Einstein Papers Project. R. Hirschmann.
29(2), 98–109
‘Your letters have been life and breath to me’: the challenge of
indexing My beloved man’ (letters of Britten and Pears). Marian
Aird. 34(4), 138–43
For the indexing of fiction, see chapter 14.
16
2. The great and good
We could look to the masterpieces of the indexing of life stories for

models to examine and follow. Where are these to be found?
Indexing masterpieces
In The Indexer of Spring 1967 Esmond de Beer wrote the first of an
intended series, ‘Indexing masterpieces’ (de Beer, 1967) devoted to
L. F. Powell’s index to his own six-volume revision of Boswell’s Life of
Johnson (Boswell, 1934–64). De Beer described this index as ‘a most
efficient and most appropriate complement to the text […] The index
reflects the conversable character of the book to which it is attached:
one dips into it, dallies, falls a willing victim, looks up reference after
reference.’ Two full pages of the index are reproduced following the
article: a page of the entry for Johnson himself, and the page running
from Panckouke, Charles Joseph to Parentheses: a pound of them.
In his turn, de Beer himself received praise from Wheatley-winner
(for his index to Pepys’ diary) Robert Latham for his own ‘superb index
to the diary of John Evelyn with […] its subtle refinements and almost
inhuman accuracy’ (Latham, 1984); ‘It gives you a model to follow’, he
declared (Latham and Latham, 1980). De Beer was also the editor of this
six-volume edition of Evelyn’s diary (Oxford, 1955). Peter Laslett wrote
in his obituary in The Guardian (Laslett, 1990):
The 600 pages of the index volume to Evelyn’s diary set a
standard amongst the whole collection of books ever published
in English. De Beer was not simply the prince of textual editors,
he was also the king of indexers. He was a marvellous man, and
lived what seemed to his friends to be the most satisfactory of
intellectual and literary lives.
17
Award winners
The Wheatley Medal ‘for an outstanding index published in the United
Kingdom during the preceding year’ (‘The Wheatley Medal’, 1970) was
awarded by the Library Association and the Society of Indexers annually
from 1961 to 2012 – but rarely to narrative indexes. As Piggott observed
in 1991:
Most of the medals had been awarded to compilers of bibliog-
raphies or to indexers of a long sequence of periodicals or of
related documents either from an individual such as letters, or
from a corporate body – its archives. (Piggott, 1991)
Matthews suggested an explanation for this (Matthews, personal
communication, 1991):
This kind of index receives very little attention from the Wheatley
judges. […] There seems to be a number of reasons, mainly to do
with having to consider abstract rather than concrete matter,
and trying to assess on the basis of value judgement rather than
straight, clear fact. It must be so much easier to judge a legal,
technological, scientific or medical work than a philosophical,
literary or even biographical one.
Indeed, a publisher suggested that there should be separate awards
for the Wheatley Medal: one for a book in the humanities, another for
the sciences (Wace, 1975).
Besides, our biography indexes need their strings attached [see
below, chapter 14], strings being generally prohibited, however, in the
criteria for indexing awards (Lee, 2001; Weinberg, 1989).
The criteria used as guidelines by the Wheatley Medal selection
committee published in 1974 (The Indexer 9(1), 22–3) included:
5. An index must have enough subheadings to avoid strings of
undifferentiated location references.
Two years later, Geoffrey Hamilton reiterated (Hamilton, 1976):
If there are numerous examples of strings with more than about
18
The great and good
six undifferentiated references the index is almost certainly not

going to achieve an outstanding grading.
As Jill Ford pointed out in 1993, ‘The conditions and criteria during
the 30-year span of the Medal’s existence have changed’, but they still
included ‘[a]voidance of strings of undifferentiated references’ (Ford,
1993).
In 2000 I sent an Open Letter to the Panel Judging the Wheatley
Award which was printed in the newsletters of all the Societies of
Indexers and in Catalogue & Index, complaining (Bell, 2000):
The latest LA Reference Awards form still includes in the criteria
for the Wheatley Medal ‘for an outstanding printed index’ the
stipulation, ‘Indexes will be judged on […] avoidance of strings
of undifferentiated page references’.
The following year the Chairman of the Wheatley Medal panel wrote
(Lee, 2001):
One of the things we are specifically asked to do is mark down
if we see strings of undifferentiated page numbers […] We
have been criticized for criticizing strings, on the grounds that
they sometimes must occur. A string of undifferentiated page
numbers in itself is not a hangable crime, and I personally accept
this, whilst generally not wanting to see too many of them.
The four narrative indexes described below managed to dodge this
bullet.
(1) In 1962 the first Wheatley ever was awarded to ‘Clemency’ Canning by
Michael Maclagan (Macmillan, 1962), a centenary biography of Charles
John, the 1st Earl Canning, Governor-General and the first Viceroy of
India: a 35-page index to a 385-page book. The index was the work of
the book’s author, the first ‘of any moment’ that he had compiled. It
was reviewed in The Indexer by G. Norman Knight (Knight, 1964), and
later discussed by Mary Piggott as an example of an author’s own index
(Piggott, 1991). Maclagan was a British historian, antiquary and herald,
Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford, for
more than forty years, a long-serving officer of arms, and Lord Mayor of
19
Oxford 1970–1. Mary Piggott attributed his success as an indexer to his

career:
The index made by any author reflects the training he has had in
his own discipline and also his own personality and experience of
life. [Maclagan] thought chronologically, was scrupulously exact
in presenting names and in distinguishing between separate
instances of the same phenomenon […] strove to fulfill the
requirements of scholarship in accurate statement and citation
[…] was also a man of affairs – he became Lord Mayor of Oxford
in 1970 – and possibly that helped him to organize his procedure
and announce it at some length at the beginning of his index.
(Piggott, 1991)
(2) In 1967 the award was won by Winston S. Churchill […] vol. 2, Young
statesman, 1901–1919 by Randolph S. Churchill (Heinemann, 1967);
index by Knight. Richard Bancroft described the text of this proposed
ten-volume series as:
a historical work conceived on a huge scale. It covers nearly a
hundred years and in this period nearly every figure and every
issue of any political importance in Great Britain is treated, often
in considerable detail. (Bancroft, 1968)
Knight, a civil servant who began freelance indexing in 1925 and
instigated the founding of the Society of Indexers in 1957, serving as its
first Chairman, had written in The Indexer the year before winning the
Wheatley a full account of his preparation of the index to volume 1, often
quoted in this book (Knight, 1966).
(3) The award for 1983 went to The diary of Samuel Pepys. Vol. XI Index,
edited by Robert Latham and W. Matthews (Bell & Hyman, 1983); index
by the first-mentioned editor. Reviews of this index appear or are quoted
in The Indexer 13(4), 272–3 and 275, and 14(2), 138. Wellisch calls it
‘an outstanding example of a modern narrative index that manages to
provide the necessary context for every indexed item with a minimum
of verbiage’ (Wellisch, 1991). Robert Latham was successively Reader
in History at Royal Holloway College, Professor of History at the
20
The great and good
University of Toronto, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge,

and Pepys Librarian until 1982, in charge of the collection of books,
prints and manuscripts which Samuel Pepys left to his old college,
as well as co-editor of this edition of Pepys’ diary. Latham described
the compilation of this index in two articles in The Indexer (Latham
and Latham, 1980; Latham, 1984). The latter is accompanied by the
reproduction of a page of it (from halfway through cambridge to carr ,
[william]); while the preceding page, butler to cambridge, is reproduced
in The Indexer 14(3), 173. Its typography is further examined below, in
Chapter 13.
(4) The Wheatley Medal for 1994 was awarded to Colin Matthew for
the 862-page index to the 13 text volumes of The Gladstone diaries
(Clarendon Press), which he also edited. This index exists both in print
and as a database, capable of being searched in combinations not foreseen
by the compiler and of being updated, expanded and corrected (Hird,
2000). Professor Matthew worked on the Gladstone diaries from 1970,
compiling the index volume in 1994. He also wrote a two-volume life of
Gladstone, and was editor of the New dictionary of national biography. He
described the (team-)work of compiling the Gladstone diaries index in
The Indexer 19(4), Oct. 1995 257–64: ‘Indexing Gladstone: from 5 x 3”
cards to computer and database’.
In the US, the H. W. Wilson Company / American Society of
Indexers Award for Excellence in Book Indexing, inaugurated in 1978,
went for the first time in 1998 to the index to a book that could be
described as at least part-soft: Dead wrong: a death row lawyer speaks out
against capital punishment by Michael Mello (University of Wisconsin).
The book, indexed by Laura Moss Gottlieb, was described by the Chair
of the judging committee, Do Mi Stauber, as:
a personal and passionate account of the author’s experiences.
As Mello says in the introduction, ‘Story is the heart of the
matter’. A book with this kind of narrative structure, which in
this case includes a large amount of information about the legal
system as well as being full of emotion, is extremely difficult to
index and needs an unusual amount of analysis. Laura Gottlieb
has gracefully extracted the conceptual material from this
21
narrative and made it accessible to the reader in a coherent

index structure. […] It’s aimed at both a legal/professional
and a general audience. […] The wording of the subentries,
especially, is elegant and descriptive, matching the tone of the
text […] the index is easy to read, even though it’s full of so much
information. (Stauber, 1998)
The book’s indexer, Laura Gottlieb, described it as the author’s
passionate account of his fourteen years as a lawyer trying to keep
people living on Death Row from being killed by the state. It is
an autobiographical narrative by a deeply feeling man, sensitive
to the complexities of the human condition. He attempts to
convince people to change the capital punishment system by
moving them emotionally through storytelling. (Gottlieb, 1998)
Laura majored in philosophy and took further degrees in library science
and English literature, worked as a librarian and editor, then took to
indexing when at home with small children, ‘without realizing that [she]
had embarked on a career that would become addictive’, and continued
to work as a freelance indexer after returning part-time to librarianship
(Bell, 2008b).
The ANZSI Medal for 2013 was awarded to Alan Walker’s index
to former Prime Minister John Howard’s autobiography Lazarus rising
(HarperCollins, 2011, revised edition). The convenor of the judging
panel reported:
The indexer faced a considerable challenge in indexing this
book because John Howard had a longer career than most
politicians, and his career encompassed a number of portfolios
both in opposition and in government. This meant the indexer
was faced with organizing a tremendous mass of material and,
most importantly, was required to use great discretion in giving
appropriate weight to important, and less important, topics.
The indexer also needed in-depth knowledge of Australian
politics and history to do the work justice. Alan Walker met
these challenges admirably, providing an extremely detailed
and comprehensive index, which at the same time is clearly
organized and easy to use.
22
The great and good
The index is remarkable for an index to an autobiography in

that there is no heading for the main protagonist, John Howard.
It takes considerable courage for an indexer to make this
decision, as often the entry for the protagonist in a biography or
an autobiography is the most lengthy and detailed in the index.
To not have an entry for the protagonist means that the indexer
must make the information that would usually be found in that
entry available by other means, namely subject indexing. The
outstanding feature of this index is its subject analysis and the
exhaustive subject headings which that analysis has generated.
[…] An extensive network of cross-references anticipates readers’
queries well. (Cousins, 2014)
In 2017 the Canadian ISC/SCI Ewart-Daveluy Award for Indexing
Excellence was presented to Judy Dunlop for her indexing of One
child reading: my auto-bibliography by Margaret Mackey (University
of Alberta Press). The indexer had to combine the author’s memories
with theoretical discussion and textual analysis; the author commented
that she was ‘awestruck’ by the ‘sensitivity’ of [the indexer’s] reading
(Awards roundup, 2017).
The following year, that award was presented to Audrey McClellan
for her index to Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty by Barry
Gough (Seaforth Publishing).
The book focuses on the relationship between Winston
Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, and John Fisher,
as first sea lord of the British Navy […] Audrey achieved a
thorough and comprehensive coverage of all relevant topics
and personal names, along with the interrelationships between
and among topics and names, within the space constraints.
(Awards roundup, 2018)
Audrey McClellan majored in English at the University of Victoria
in British Columbia. Through the university’s co-op programme she
spent three terms at Harbour Publishing, editing books, writing indexes,
and learning about book promotion and the publishing process. After
graduation she worked in-house at Harbour Publishing, New Star Books,
and International Self-Counsel Press before going freelance in 1997.
23
Since then she has worked as an editor and indexer of trade and academic
books and textbooks.
Award-winning indexes to volumes of letters by five different
correspondents are described in Chapter 1.
Cecelia Wittmann has compared subheadings used in award-winning
and non-award-winning pairs of biographies, histories, and documentary
texts – see Chapter 5.
Other good ’uns

Some other narrative indexes, lacking awards, have received high praise.
One has been commended by the Wheatley Panel: that to Dickens by
Peter Ackroyd (Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990); a 41-page index
to 1,083 pages of text. This was compiled by Douglas Matthews (who
receives no acknowledgement in the volume as indexer). He comments,
‘What was unusual about Dickens was its bulk, and the dominance of the
central character’, and that he was glad to have ‘had some experience of the
subject, having fairly recently compiled the index to vol. 6 of the Dickens
letters (Clarendon Press, 1988). The consequent familiarity with Dickens
and his circle was a great help’ (Matthews, personal communication,
1991). This index was described by the Chair of the Wheatley Panel as
‘lively, full of character, well organized, and as distinctive as the book
it so ably complements’ (Wheatley Medal, 1992). (In 1991 a paperback
edition of this Dickens biography was published by Mandarin. The index
appears to have been reset or run though a computer programme that
unintelligently rearranged many of its subheadings; all comments made
here on this index refer to the original, hardback edition which was the
subject of the Wheatley Panel Commendation.)
Douglas Matthews, who has compiled so many of the indexes
commended in this volume, and is its most-cited writer, compiled
hundreds of indexes (his first in 1957) alongside his day job as Librarian
of London Library. When the BBC mounted a radio programme in
1999 ‘in the form of a discussion between a biographer and an indexer,’
Douglas was the selected representative of the second profession
(Matthews, 1999). In the 2013 New Year’s Honours List he was awarded
an OBE, as ‘Literary Indexer. For services to Literature’. Christopher
Phipps, in a tribute to Douglas on his ninetieth birthday, wrote:
24
The great and good
Douglas Matthews must easily win the competition for that

most coveted of prizes for our lonely, long-distance profession:
the named mention in the acknowledgements section. There he
is often billed as ‘prince among indexers’. […] He is the epitome
of what we must hope is not a dying breed, the scholarly librarian
turned indexer […] His indexes, so readily identifiable at first
glance as ‘a Douglas Matthews index’, remain exemplars of
concision, efficacy and wit. (Phipps, 2017)
Indeed, Douglas Matthews may be regarded as the proper successor to
Esmond de Beer as ‘king of indexers’.
In Training in indexing (M.I.T. Press, 1968) James Thornton cited his
own selection of ‘four masterly indexes, to which the student of indexing
would do well to pin his faith […] it is good practice to examine good
indexes to learn the principles on which they were compiled’ (Thornton,
1968). His choice included a biography, a diary and a collection of letters:
respectively, the index to L. F. Powell’s revision (1964) of Birkbeck
Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (Boswell, 1887);
R. W. Chapman’s to his edition of Samuel Johnson’s letters, and E. S. de
Beer’s to his edition of John Evelyn’s diary, all described above. Of the
first, he added:
Had not Powell produced his own index, [I] would have
included the one by his predecessor, Birkbeck Hill, an index
produced in 1892 and one of the first major indexes that still
satisfy the requirements of modern scholarship. Birkbeck Hill’s
contribution to the profession of indexing is his introduction
of alphabetical order and categorization into the descriptive
material or subheadings within each entry or article.
In her survey, ‘Biography indexes reviewed’ Catherine Sassen quoted
the praise lavished on Joel Blanchard as editor and indexer of the
Mémoires of Philippe De Commynes (Livre de poche, 2002) in a review
(Sassen, 2012): ‘Anyone wanting to locate a particular passage will be
especially appreciative of Blanchard’s index. Nearly two hundred pages
in length, it provides detailed analytical coverage of all the mentions of
persons, places and themes. The chapter index also provides a summary
of the contents of each chapter.’
25
Narrative indexes sometimes appear in the ‘Indexes praised’ section

of The Indexer’s regular feature, ‘Indexes Reviewed’. These have received
there the praise cited below (only one indexer named by the reviewer,
alas):
• War diaries 1939–1945, by Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke,
ed. by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2001). ‘The editors are to be congratulated on their
work and on the excellent index, a model of its kind.’ (Index
by Douglas Matthews).
• The double bond: Primo Levi: a biography by Carole Angier
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). ‘Scrupulously indexed’.
• Somerset Maugham and the Maugham dynasty by Bryan
Connon (Sinclair Stevenson, 1997). ‘Its index is superb’.
• Michelangelo: a biography by George Bull (Viking, 1995). ‘The
index [is] exhaustively detailed and efficient’.
• Boris Yeltsin: a revolutionary life by Leon Aron (HarperCollins,
2000). ‘A comprehensive and painstakingly well-researched –
and indexed – study’.
In 1998 Shirley Kessel, an American indexer, wrote to me: ‘I’ve
been looking at some indexes of biographies published in the UK. Two
especially stand out. One is Roy Jenkins’ biography of Gladstone; the
other is the two-volume (soon to be three) biography of Keynes by
Robert Skidelsky’ (personal communication). Gladstone by Roy Jenkins
(Macmillan, 1995; which volume won the Whitbread prize for that year)
includes in Jenkins’s preface an acknowledgement, ‘Douglas Matthews,
former librarian of the London Library, has once more compiled a
complicated index’.
Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920;
Vol. 2: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 was published by Macmillan,
1983 / 1992. Douglas Matthews indexed Vol. 2 (and is not listed in the
three full pages of acknowledgements).
26
The great and good
* * *
I feel that I should also expose some of my own attempts to implement
the principles advocated herein, so list also some of my indexes to
biographies:
Jane Austen by Claire Tomalin; Viking, 1998
Alistair Cooke by Nick Clarke; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999
Emily Dickinson and the hill of science by Robin Peel; Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2009
Adam Ferguson: history, progress and human nature ed. E. Heath
and V. Merolle; Pickering & Chatto, 2008
Thomas Hardy: the guarded life by Ralph Pite; Picador, 2006,
2008
Daughter of the desert by Georgina Howell; Pan Macmillan, 2006
Arthur Koestler: the homeless mind by David Cesarani;
Heinemann, 1998
The world is what it is: the authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul by
Patrick French; Picador, 2008
Rasputin: the last word by Edvard Radzinsky; Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2000
Joshua Reynolds by Ian McIntyre; Allen Lane, 2003
Virginia Woolf: an inner life by Julia Briggs; Allen Lane, 2004
Articles about the evaluation of indexes that have appeared in The

Indexer are:
Some requirements of good indexes. Richard Bancroft. 4(1), 17–20
Criteria for awarding the Wheatley Medal. 6(2), 63–6
What is a good index? F. H. C. Tatham. 8(1), 23–8
The perfect index. John L. Thornton. 8(4), 206–9
The inadequacies of book indexes: symposium. 9(1), 1–9
Selective indexing: symposium. 9(2), 59–65
How to recognize a good index. Geoffrey Hamilton. 10(2), 49–53
Evaluating index systems: a review after Cranfield. John J. Regazzi.
12(1), 14–21
27
The unconventional index and its merits. William S. Heckscher. 13(1),

6–25
Assessing indexes. Jean Simpkins. 14(3), 179–80
Index, how not to. John A. Vickers. 15(3), 163–6
Sic, sic, sic! Jean Simpkins 16(3), 104–5
Subheadings in award-winning book indexes: a quantitative evaluation.
Cecelia Wittmann. 17(1), 3–6
Authors as their own indexers. Mary Piggott. 17(3), 161–6
Could still do better: the revised index to the Newman biography. John
A. Vickers. 17(3), 189–90
Unacademic indexing. John A. Vickers. 18(1), 23–4
Oh, dear, what can the matter be this time? John A. Vickers 18(3),
155–6
Information access or information anxiety? An exploratory evaluation of
book index features. C. Jörgensen and E. D. Liddy. 20(2), 64–8
Let’s get usable! Susan C. Olason. 22(2), 91–5
Judging indexes: the criteria for a good index. David Lee. 22(4), 191–4
Do Mi’s second rule or the functions of subheadings. Do Mi Stauber.
24(4), 192–6
Biography indexes reviewed. Catherine Sassen. 30(3), 136–9
The ANZSI Medal 2012: some thoughts on what makes a prize–
winning index. ANZSI Medal Committee. 31(1), 35–6
History indexes reviewed. Catherine Sassen. 31(3), 105–9
Reflections on the Wilson judging for 2012. Margie Towery. 31(3), C7
Evaluating an index together: Heartland chapter workshop. Laura
A. Ewald. 31(4), 168–9
ASI/EBSCO Publishing Award. 31(4), 169–71
Evaluating indexes: observations on ANZSI experience. Sherrey Quinn
33(3), 107–12
A full list of articles on this subject in The Indexer can be found on the
website at https://www.theindexer.org/indexes/contents-by-category/
under Practice of indexing
28
3. First read your book
Faced thus with little-known subject-matter, the indexer of life-stories

should, ideally, read the text in hand straight through before starting to
work on it – if only time permits!
Ideally, we should read the text to learn its subject matter, and come
to know the material we are to work on, as a potter does his clay. We
need to gain a perspective on the text, to know which will be major,
which minor, subjects, which will recur and accrue large entries, needing
careful management. We need not to be distracted from our work by
sheer interest in the development of the text as we work through it, so
read it first for inoculation! We must also avoid the risk of dismissing
apparently negligible early mentions that may later prove to be significant
first glimpses of important characters or themes. We must see the book
not just item by item, to be reduced to minor, specific entries, but also
the overall patterns of development to be allotted generalizing terms and
chronological divisions. It is particularly difficult to index biographies at
first sight.
Tom Murphy explored ‘the possibilities of indexing as a teaching tool’
for studying literature, as such indexing ‘required a special kind of close
reading – one that could not rest on merely superficial understandings
but demanded a recursive flow, the constant back and forth of careful
reading and re-reading’ (Murphy, 2003).
To gain a clear, overall comprehension of the whole work, indexers
really need to be supplied with all the parts of the volume that will help
to give this full insight – those prelims, illustrations, chronologies, maps,
notes, bibliographies and other appendages that are often withheld
from us as ‘they aren’t yet available and they won’t need to be indexed’.
Included in the index, perhaps not – but included in and contributing to
the indexer’s understanding, they should be.
Preliminary reading also shows us the density of the text, so that,
knowing the space allotted for the index and thus the allowable numbers
29
of entries (remembering though that subheadings, expressed in words,

take disproportionately more space than page references, expressed in
figures), we can estimate the strike level of significance for which we
allot entries, and the degree to which they can be broken down into
subentries. Narrative indexing depends on and derives from close and
sensitive reading of the entire text in hand. To enable this, it may be
helpful for the publisher to send a copy of the text for advance reading by
the indexer before the page proofs are available for indexing.
Laura Moss Gottlieb, who specializes in indexing academic books
in the humanities, winner of the H. W. Wilson Company / American
Society of Indexers Award for Excellence in Book Indexing in 1998,
strongly advocates reading the whole book before setting finger to
keyboard (Gottlieb, 1998).
I believe that the job of every indexer is to be the author’s most
sympathetic reader: to understand what the author is saying
and to provide a map to his or her views so that the reader
can quickly and easily find them. […] My primary indexing
technique is simply this: I read the whole book before I begin to
index. […] The main point of reading the whole book is to follow
and understand the author’s argument before I get near the
computer. This gives me the confidence that I understand the
argument, know its main points, can locate related themes, and
won’t have to spend a lot of time going back through the page
proofs trying desperately to locate material the importance of
which I didn’t realize until later. It feels like an ethical, confident
way to index academic books of this type.
And Douglas Matthews insists:
There can be no shortcutting that basic, dogged, analytical
reading of the whole work and then arranging it to make the
text easy for consultation, which is the essential function of the
indexer. That is what takes the time, not the manner of recording
the entries. (Matthews, 1996)
30
First read your book
Analysis and annotation

Once we have seen the text steadily and whole, we may proceed to a
second, entry-making reading. This is a more disjointed journey through
the text, reducing it to its component parts and strands – not merely
name- or capital-letter spotting! In deciding for which factors to make
index entries, we are not extracting selected terms, leaving an unindexed
mass, but reducing the entire text to denser units, with only the vaguest,
most general passages not subsumed under some broad heading.
Indexers of biographies focus on one paragraph at a time to see what
features in it, while keeping in mind the unit of the enveloping chapter
and the relation of all its elements to the whole book – the gestalt. We
are analysing and documenting human life and relationships at several
levels – assuredly, a complex business. As Matthews puts it, discussing
the narrative nature of biography:
The index can be seen almost as an abstract of the life […] but
differs from the narrative in being able to signal any feature at
any stage of a life. You might open a book at random and happen
on something of interest; the index gives you a set of keys to
particular and appropriate doors […] A good index points out
the main features in the landscape of a text. (Matthews, 1999)
As the biographical indexer works through a book, lists grow ever
longer: the overall, single list that will form the ultimate index, and the
subsidiary ones for each major character and theme, to be integrated
eventually into the larger unit. As characters and topics recur after their
first entry, a choice must be made for each further reference as to whether
the new page number should merely be added to the others, inserted
under one of the existing subheads, or under a new subheading. Lists
of notes to be edited later into entries come to resemble jottings for an
essay or article.
Many references are not closed at this point. ‘J ones: seaside holiday
56–’ may remain so, awaiting the closing page number perhaps until the
final editing stage. Characters appear and disappear as on a stage – their
entries and exits may be clearly apparent, but they remain on stage in
the background, unmentioned, yet needing continuous watching, with
31
perhaps an open-pagination reference maintained for them, and we

must at some time establish the point where the reference should be
terminated.
This read-through while making entries is disjointed in several ways.
Not only is our manner of reading and working at this stage fragmented:
read the text, mark it (with pen on page or highlighter on screen), key in
entry, think, back to text; but also the indexer is consciously unravelling
the carefully composed text, trying to understand the author’s mind in
order to undo their work of synthesis.
For each paragraph, several separate questions must be answered
simultaneously. The simplest are, ‘What is mentioned in this paragraph?
Who (plural!) appear in it?’ Then, for each character: ‘What new things
does the paragraph tell us about the characters and themes that have
already appeared? Or, is this one merely continuing references we have
already opened?’ ‘How are the contents of this paragraph contained
within/related to the rest of the chapter/book?’ The overall concepts,
abstract themes, that pervade the book must also be watched – general
events or developments in relationships, perhaps implied rather than
stated, so that subheadings are needed for denoting outbreak of war; end
of affaire . And meanwhile…, we constantly have to note, and meanwhile
[…].
All the criteria of good indexes that seem most important to me
– faithfully maintaining the attitudes of the text in the language used;
correspondence of importance in the text with space allotted in the
index; the most fitting arrangement of subheadings to form a coherent
whole under each long entry – must derive from a close, sensitive reading
of the text.
By the selection of items to specify subheadings, the indexer is
choosing to emphasize particular aspects of the text over others –
interpreting the text for the reader. Perhaps our hero, on a single page, on
his thirtieth birthday, in 1949, in Surbiton, attends a socially important
garden party, where he meets old friends, then falls and breaks his ankle.
Which, or how many, aspects of this occasion/stage of his life would
we pick out to designate in the subheadings? We have to determine the
relative degrees of importance in the author’s intention and the reader’s
response.
32
First read your book
Coverage
Extraneous matter such as prologue, acknowledgements, illustrations,
bibliography, and appendices may well qualify for inclusion in the
indexes to biographies. I would take a specific decision as to what to
include for each book, rather than advocating a general rule. I usually
give an index reference to anyone in the acknowledgements who also
appears in the text; I would not index the thanks to the author’s wife for
keeping the children quiet while he wrote, but would include reference
to the widow of the book’s hero who had made his papers available
and answered questions about him; that is relevant to his life and
relationships.
Illustrations should be included in the index if possible, even if we
are indicating less their exact position in the volume than that there are
in fact pictures of the people or places to be found. It can be difficult to
get a list of the illustrations from the publisher in time to include them
in the index, let alone the actual captions or the pictures themselves.
If closer indexing of the pictures is not possible for these reasons, I
include ill. at the end of the appropriate entries to convey that a search
through the section of illustrations will be rewarded. Since photographs
are usually gathered together in batches in the books, easily detectable
from looking at the page edges, this does not seem quite inadequate
information.
Hans Wellisch, though, advocated much closer indexing of
illustrations in a biography, as well as of the bibliography:
Pictures in a biography should not merely be indexed by
a string of locators under the name of the biographee but
also specified as to what they show about the person’s life at
various stages and in different environments or occupations.
(Wellisch, 1991)
Wellisch also recommends either typographical differentiation of
locators for illustrations by printing them in italics or boldface, adding an
asterisk or enclosing them in square brackets, or ‘the use of a subheading
which makes it possible to specify not only the place but also the type of
picture’ (photo, portrait, sketches).
33
For maps, I will list the map title, but not its contents. Bibliographies,
rather than being duplicated in the index, may best be covered by
including their section or topic headings, if these have been supplied.
34
4. Naming names
Minor references to characters, or those making a single appearance in the

book – ancestors, school friends in an early chapter, who then disappear
from the life of the main character and the text – may appear simple to
cope with. We list their names alone, without benefit of gloss or subhead
(unless more than one character has the same name, when glosses should
be provided – see below). Glosses may also be needed for names in the
index when characters make their first appearances in the text unnamed,
and need to be identified on the text page by the index user.
‘Names-only indexing’ sounds the simplest sort. There may, however,
be many complexities in a name; causing much more than nominal
difficulty for the indexer. The difficulties must be resolved, though.
Douglas Matthews declares:
I have always taken the view that so far as possible an index should
be a self-sufficient reference tool, and in indexing historical
works I am prepared to spend a great deal of time researching
correct names and titles. (Matthews, 2004)
Alternative forms
People change their names. Women marry, maybe more than once, maybe
reverting to a former name after divorce; writers adopt pseudonyms,
actors stage names; criminals take aliases; people are ennobled, acquiring
complexities of titles; they change names by deed poll for various motives
(surely not just for spite against indexers). Knight reported, ‘one lady
who had been indexed under her married name actually reverted to her
maiden name between one proof stage and the foundry pulls’ (Knight,
1966). The only steadfast rule for indexing names can be that people
should be findable – perhaps with the help of cross-references – under
whichever possible version of their names they are likely to be sought,
35
and identifiable when reached, as the person originally perhaps sought

under another name, by confirmation in brackets (née, formerly, later,
etc. with alternative versions).
Imposing rules of consistency, such as that all married women must
be entered under their married name (or the first, or the last, of them),
or all peers under their family name, may result in quite perversely
obscure instances of the unfamiliar form being the chosen one (as well as
according greater significance to status than to individuality). Particular
principles adopted may be explained in preliminary notes, and a plethora
of cross-references may point from any alternative callings to the selected
one (if space allows – cross-references are space-devouring, usually
taking at least two lines each).
Knight had to contend with peculiarity in the form of names of the
family he was indexing:
One problem […] concerned the alphabetical arrangement of
the Churchill family. It may not be universally known that
Sir Winston himself had a hyphenated surname and the ever
rightfully punctilious Court Circular right up to the end of
1951 invariably referred to him as Winston Spencer-Churchill.
[…] But in a letter to his father as early as 1888 he explained:
‘I never write myself Spencer Churchill but always Winston
S. Churchill’. […] Since scarcely anyone would dream of looking
for his name or those of his parents, Lord and Lady Randolph,
under ‘S’, they were indexed under ‘C’. For the meticulous-
minded, however, cross-referencing is provided in the entry
under ‘Spencer-Churchill’. (Knight, 1966)
Margaret Drabble also complained about hyphenated names in
indexes, in her case from the user’s point of view, with reference to
writing her biography of Angus Wilson (Drabble, no date):
Angus Wilson’s family presented great problems of naming
because they were Johnstone-Wilsons and it is not a good idea
to write a biography of a hyphenated person because you have
to look everything up twice over. If you don’t find what you seek
under one name you have to look it up under the other and this
can double your research time.
36
Naming names
A thoroughly punctilious index in the matter of name changes and

alternatives is that to Anthony Eden by Robert Rhodes James (Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1986. Only five years after the publication of that volume,
I was quite unable to trace the name of the indexer: an indication of the
small credit and accreditation that indexers receive). Quoted below is
part of its preliminary note referring to treatment of names, followed by
some of its main entries for these:
Many people mentioned in the biography succeeded to titles
or were created life peers after the events described; they are
indexed either by surname or by their title at the time. Those
who entered into their titles during the period covered will
be found under their latest title, with the appropriate cross-
reference(s) from their surname or previous title. To avoid
overloading an already long index, the prefix ‘Rt Hon’ has been
omitted throughout.
Brooke, Lady (Marjorie, née Eden, later Countess of Warwick)
(sister)
Churchill, Clarissa (later Mrs Anthony Eden, afterwards Countess of
Avon), see Eden, Clarissa
Dunglass, Lord (Alexander Douglas-Home, later 14th Earl of
Home, q.v.)
Eden, Clarissa (née Churchill, later Mrs Anthony Eden, afterwards
Lady Eden, now Countess of Avon)
Eden, John (Jack) (brother)
Eden, John Benedict (now Lord Eden of Winton) (nephew)
Evans, Sir Horace (later Baron Evans)
Home, 14th Earl of (Sir Alexander Douglas-Home, later Baron
Home of the Hirsel): (as Lord Dunglass), PPS to AE (James,
1986)
Presumably, if space were short for the index, or the references few
or casual, these names might not be so fully cited. Note here the variety
of information given to supplement names: former and subsequent titles;
nicknames; relationship to the central character of the book. Using the
right name or title for people at the dates at which events being indexed
occurred is considered above, in the section on indexing letters.
37
John Brown, meet John Brown

The opposite problem to a plethora of forms of name for one individual,
of course, is name-sharing among several. John Vickers lamented:
In the field with which I am best acquainted, not only is there
a whole family of Wesleys (including at least three Samuels –
father, son and grandson), but such potential hazards as a George
Whitefield (1714–1770) and a totally unrelated near-namesake,
George Whitfield (1753–1832), whose surnames are sometimes
spelled interchangeably. Similarly, English literature has two
Samuel Butlers (died 1680 and 1912 respectively); while Samuel
Johnson the author of the hymn ‘City of God, how broad and
far’ is not the Samuel Johnson of 18th-century Grub Street.
(Vickers, 1991)
Where more than one character has the same name, some gloss should
be given to each to differentiate them: their dates if known; their
relationship if any (Sr, Jr; son of above); profession; role in the book; or
whatever information is available to cite.
Philip Marris, producing a family history stretching back 30
generations, replete with myriad Georges, Johns, Thomasses, and
Williams of the same ilk, distinguished them by allotting each individual
their own generation number in parentheses, from de Marč, Osbert /
Otbert (1), a Domesday tenant whose son fought at the Battle of Hastings
in 1066, to Marris, Richard Quentery (30), who served in the RAF in
World War II (Marris, 2019).
Who are all these people?

There may, too, be those incompletely named in our books. We should
try to ensure that all are named in full in the index. Surnames alone
in an index are not satisfactory – we should try to provide forenames
or initials if the text does not supply them, by consulting appropriate
reference books or googling for public figures, or asking the author
for forenames of the otherwise unknown. Names must be expanded
and identities hunted down. ‘Jones, Mr’, clearly needs expansion or
38
Naming names
explanation; and alphabetical order will be affected by having eight

Joneses with forenames listed, with nameless ‘Mr’, or – , or (gardener).
Readers who know that his name was in fact William may miss him,
initial-less at the top of the list.
Where full names are not available, epithets may be provided as
glosses:
Annie (housemaid)
Edward (birthday party guest)
Jones, Mr (tailor)
For several members of the same family, with the same surname,
it is best to specify in brackets their relationship to the main character.
This breaks up long columns of the same name with helpful information,
especially when a relative – the mother, perhaps – is being sought without
the forename being known. The names of the families of the subjects of
biographies are quite likely not to be widely known.
Glosses explain the main entry, and are enclosed in brackets, as
distinct from subheadings, which specify particular references subdivided
under the main entry.
Knight praised the glosses used in the ‘Clemency’ Canning index
(Knight, 1964):
Of the many unusual excellences in this index I must mention
just one. Where the name of a historical character occurs as a
main heading, in nearly every case it is followed by the date of
death in brackets. This innovation, which is particularly useful in
a historical biography, must have involved considerable research
[how lucky we are today to have the Internet!]. Where he has
been unable to supply the date of death the indexer sometimes
replaces it with a brief but colourful description, as in the
following: Khanlar Mirza, craven Persian prince, 53.
Knight was generous indeed with his own glosses for the Churchill series
(Knight, 1966):
As regards my entries generally, these will be found to be
somewhat fuller than is common in today’s practice. That is to
say, I was not content with providing a mere list of proper names
39
and subjects, but in nearly every case supplied either a brief

description of the item forming the heading or else briefly what
happened to him, her, or it, in the text.
This information included dates and other details often ‘not available
in the text, and involved a good deal of research’. Knight describes one
example:
When he was at his preparatory school, Winston twice wrote to
his mother expressing a desire to see Buffalo Bill. I felt that the
mere heading: Buffalo Bill, 90 bis rather lacked point. Accordingly
my entry runs: Buffalo Bill (W.F. Cody, 1845–1917), WSC wants
to see (1887), 90 bis
The preface to the volume stated, ‘the necessary details of rank and
identification will be found in the index’. Knight particularly considers
the question of giving dates after names in the index:
I think that in historical works particularly, the practice is a
useful one, although of course it involves more work for the
indexer.
(Again, our sympathies go to the pre-Internet indexer!)
De Beer tells us, ‘For persons Dr Powell [in the index to Boswell’s Life
of Johnson] inserts dates of birth and death and a biographical definition:
e.g. Abington, Mrs Frances, 1737–1815, actress. He comments, ‘This is
requisite where it identifies or distinguishes persons, but elsewhere seems
to me intrusive’ (de Beer, 1967).
Errors and inconsistencies

We must also check that the spelling of names is correct. Sir Alec
Guinness or Guiness? We are not necessarily querying the author’s
accuracy; typesetting errors in the proofs may be faithfully copied in
the index. Indexers, as they collocate references, are likely to discover
inconsistencies and omissions in the text that have escaped notice
throughout the production process until this stage. Only the indexer
is likely to realize that a character appears as Ann or Miss Phillips on
page 26, Anne or Philips on 126, or to ask for certain missing forenames
40
Naming names
to complete name entries – thus drawing attention to the fact that the
full names should really have been given to start with – and requesting
a pronouncement on the correct spellings for the index. This may
have a knock-on effect: Philipps or Phillips may have to be moved in
alphabetical sequence, and Jones, Mr, sink from the top of the Jones
column to the bottom as Jones, William.
Matthews claims that indexers do more than compile the index,
functioning also as ‘longstop copy editors’, or ‘test drivers’, finding
unnoticed errors and inconsistencies in the text in time to alert the
author (Matthews, 1993).
Lord, My
The complications of indexing the peerage are horrendous. Clear, detailed
guidance is offered by David Lee, on the degrees of British peerage,
the particular problems of Ladies’ names, hyphenation, and form and
choice of name for indexes (Lee, 1991). He advocates that peers should
be indexed by the name by which they are best known, rather than
according to any rigidly standardized principle, with cross-references
from alternative forms (if space permits), except that:
If there are many members of a family dealt with in the book
[…] some with titles, others with courtesy titles and others with
surnames and forenames alone, the temptation to standardize
on the use of the patronymic only (and refer from titles) […]
probably should not be resisted.
Maclagan states in the note at the head of the index to ‘Clemency’ Canning
(Knight, 1964):
Historical personages are given under the name by which they
are best known, e.g., Palmerston, not Temple, but Vernon Smith,
not Lord Lyveden.
Pseudonyms
Pseudonyms and nicknames can cause problems beyond a profusion
of cross-referencing if alternative versions are used through long
41
sequences of the text. In Stalin (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995) through

the section describing his childhood, he was referred to as ‘Soso’, his
nickname then; later by his code-name of ‘Koba’. Readers searching
for references to him at those periods might not recognize these
pseudonyms as denoting the later so-called ‘Stalin’. My entry for him
in the index read:
Stalin (Joseph V. Dzhugashvili; childhood name ‘Soso’; later
pseudonym ‘Koba’)
A further complication with pseudonyms such as Stalin is that they
stand alone, with no forenames; but have become so commonly known
that the real-life forenames are often, incorrectly, attached to them – as,
Stalin, Joseph. Other examples should correctly appear as:
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)
Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle)
Articles on indexing names that have appeared in The Indexer are:

Arrangement of entries in Post Office telephone directories. Inland
Telecommunications Department 2(4), 142–3
The hereditary peerage. Hebe Jerrold. 3(3), 130
Indexing peers. M. D. Anderson. 4(2), 51
Post Office filing. M. Gorman & G. N. Knight. 7(3), 118–20
Developing a system of indexing surnames in the Home Office. John
L. Rush. 12(2), 81–2
Name of an author! Anne B. Piternick 18(2), 95–9
Coping with a title: the indexer and the British aristocracy. David Lee
17(3), 155–60
Cataloging rules and tools: an aid for the indexing of names. Debra
Spidal. 30(4), 186–90
Personal names in indexes. Susan Curran. 36(3), 108–14
See also Indexing names. Noeline Bridge (ed). Medford, NJ:

Information Today Inc., 2012.
42
Naming names
For advice on what to do about variant spellings of what is clearly the

same surname in the period before spelling was standardized, how
to deal with patronymics and aliases, surname prefixes – English and
foreign, medieval and modern see R. F. Hunnisett, Indexing for editors.
London: British Records Association, 1997.
Foreign names may cause particular problems to the indexer. For
a full list of articles that have appeared in The Indexer on countries and
languages, see ‘Countries and languages’ in ‘Contents by category’ on
The Indexer’s website.
43
5. Coming to terms:
subheadings
The official criteria for the language to be used for indexing militate
against soft-text indexers. Soft texts may be the individual products
of imaginative writers with particular vision, expressed in sensitive,
subtle language that contains and deploys much more than mere
information. Soft indexers must employ a f lexible range of vocabulary
to meet the authors’ individual perception and expression. The words
we choose to use in our indexes – besides the predetermined nouns
– involve several different principles and difficulties, and must meet
several criteria. This may be found an enjoyable challenge and skill:
Robert Latham spoke of the pleasures of indexing as partly ‘those of
a Victorian paper game […] you have to find the appropriate word
or words to summarize or “indicate” the subject of the reference or
references’ (Latham, 1984).
The terms to be used in main headings – most usually nouns –
indexers can pick directly from the text, as enjoined by BS ISO 999 clause
7.2.1.2: ‘Headings should be chosen from the terminology employed
in the document’, perhaps enhanced by glosses as considered above
(Chapter 4). The subheadings, though, must often be of our own devising,
to convey the tenor of the text indicated. They may be generalizing terms
not used in the text: char acter , childhood, career , health , social life; or
they may be supplied by us as précis of the passages. Cecelia Wittmann
found:
Only 20% of the subheadings in indexes to historical narratives
closely match the text, probably because the task for the indexer
here is principally to summarize the various events and ideas
described in the text, not to provide access to the author’s own
words. (Wittmann, 1990)
44
Coming to terms: subheadings
Cleveland and Cleveland (1983) distinguish between assigned-term

indexing language, where the indexer must ‘assign terms or descriptors
on the basis of subjective interpretation of the concepts implied in the
document’, and derived-term systems, or indexing by extraction, in which
the indexer (or computer) ‘selects the terms to be used directly from the
text being indexed’. The former type involves ‘more intellectual effort’.
In devising our subheadings, we bring to bear all the skills learned
in English lessons for précis or summary: analysing the text; identifying
the central, most important topics of each passage; and devising the
most concise and appropriate terms in which to encapsulate the ideas.
Carey declared the compilation of subheadings ‘the task that calls for the
indexer’s highest skill of all’ (Carey, 1961).
Christopher Phipps (2102) claims ‘in our formation of headings
[…] we should in a small way allow ourselves something of the flair
and enjoyment of creative writing’ and quotes the historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper as saying, ‘the index must be readable in itself, contin-
uously, as an added chapter’.
An example of such an indexer-created, splendidly suitable to the
text, subheading comes at the end of Phipps’s section in his index to
Samuel Johnson: A Biography by Peter Martin (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2008) about Johnson’s labours on the construction of his Dictionary:
Robert Dodsley’s idea for a dictionary; planning the Dictionary;
work begins; and comes to a screeching halt
Douglas Matthews gives another example of such interpretative
indexing, in his index to Laurence Olivier’s autobiography, Confessions of
an actor (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1982). This includes Olivier’s account
of how he met Vivien Leigh, fell in love with her, and conducted a furtive
affair with her for two years while he was still married to his first wife,
Jill Esmond. Esmond herself makes no appearance through these pages
of the text. But her entry in the index cannot omit reference to the affair;
it impinged so greatly on her. The penultimate subheading in the index
entry that Douglas contrived for Esmond, Jill, is
– supplanted by Vivien Leigh
That term does not appear in Oliver’s writing. It derives purely from
Matthews’ analysis and interpretation of the text.
45
Qualities to aim for

Wittmann compared subheadings used in award-winning and non-award-
winning pairs of biographies, histories, and documentary texts (including
the biographies of Canning and Churchill cited above) (Wittmann,
1990). She drew conclusions about the differences between award-
winning and ordinary indexes, and between narrative and documentary
indexes. Among her findings were:
Subheadings in award-winning indexes are more consistently
content-rich than the subheadings in other indexes.
Subheadings in award-winning indexes are vivid and concise,
conveying in a few words the essence of the material indexed;
in contrast, the subheadings in other indexes are often cryptic,
rambling, or vague.
Subheadings in indexes to historical narratives average about
five words in length [compared to subheadings half as long
in indexes to texts consisting principally of documents] […]
probably because they are phrases summarizing an event
described in the text.
An overwhelming majority of the subheadings in award-winning
indexes began with such significant words as nouns, verbs or
participles.
In all the award-winning indexes, topical subheadings
predominate; that is, the subheadings are not syntactically
related to the main heading under which they occur. (E.g.:
Bengal army / enlistment terms (topical subheading)
And the subheadings are direct-order, the heading and subheading
together forming a natural phrase, such as:
N orwegians / take British wives
Non-award-winning indexes, by contrast, have chiefly indirect-order
subheadings, which have to be read inverted, moving the subheading
before the main heading, to form a phrase, as:
46
N ovaya Zemlya / latitude of

These, then, are the characteristics to aim for in the subheadings we
provide to narrative texts: vivid, content-rich, topical rather than
syntactical, concise, about five words long, beginning with a significant
word, and forming a natural phrase in direct order.
We must also bear in mind just what degree of specification is
needed in our subheadings – what possible question of the reader’s we are
answering. This may be either, ‘Where can I find the information I know
is in this book?’ when the reader already knows what is there to be found,
and seeks only identification of the items in the index; or, ‘What does this
book tell me about the person?’ This one is more difficult to answer, and
our choice of terms here must be highly informative.
Yet there can be no accepted correct version of subheadings for
a given biography. Let us compare two different entries for the same
narrative thread in one (auto)biography – that of Samuel Pepys. This
text is told in the first person; the indexer has to interpret Pepys’s own
version of events for third parties. In the first example, the index to
H. B. Wheatley’s nine-volume edition of Pepys diary, of 1914, we find:
Willet (Deb), Mrs. Pepys’s new girl, arrives; taken to Brampton; Mrs
Pepys is jealous of her; Pepys kisses her; combs Pepys’s hair;
her birthplace at Bristol; Mrs. Pepys catches Samuel embracing
her; Pepys discharges her, and advises her never to see him
again; her aunt.
Then, {alluded to} [ten lines of page numbers].
Seventy years later, the Wheatley award for 1983 went to Robert
Latham for his index to his 11-volume edition of the diary. He gave
Willet, Deb, companion to EP (Elizabeth Pepys) a fuller, franker treatment
divided into four paragraphs – appear ance: as ep ’s companion: p ’s affair
with : and social . Under p ’s affair with in Latham’s index come –
P pleased with; EP jealous; P kisses; caresses; discovered by EP;

her rage and P’s guilt; P fears she must leave; is prevented
from seeing; her confession; and dismissal; P searches for;
EP threatens to slit her nose; P never to see again; […] sees
in street; EP makes jealous scenes; threatens him with hot
47
tongs; he meets by chance; […] winks at P in street; moves to

Greenwich […]
Those are two quite different index entries for exactly the same text. But
we cannot suggest that either is wrong: the first is endorsed by ‘the father
of indexing’, Wheatley himself, as the volume editor; the second won the
award bestowed in Wheatley’s name! The devising of subheadings for
biographies is a subjective, not standardized, matter.
Language fit for literature

ISO, 1996 encourages the omission of prepositions in subheadings.
This may result in indexes that rap out basic elements of information
in staccato fashion, suitable for scanning and consultation rather than
reading. The absence of prepositions produces a vague suggestion of
connection, ‘related in some way to’. The language of the indexes for
narratives should rather flow in natural reading fashion; we are not
attempting to boil down the text and extract basic information items,
but to mirror it in miniature and guide readers through a condensed
world of characters and ideas. In soft indexing, there is much virtue in
prepositions.
The language used should complement that of the text. Latham
‘hoped to capture in the index the flavour of the diary’, and attributed
much of his success in indexing Pepys to the help of his wife with
her expertise in word games, as they sought ‘the appropriate word for
comprehensive headings or verbal formulas for a whole series of related
subjects’ (Latham and Latham, 1980). Part of de Beer’s praise for
Powell’s index was that it ‘reflects the conversable character of the book
to which it is attached’ (de Beer, 1967). Bancroft writes of Knight’s index
to Churchill, ‘the choice of wording for the entries gives the sense of
the item referred to fairly and fully’, and was described as ‘precept put
into practice with elegance and precision’ (Bancroft, 1968). The Wilson
Panel’s praise of Gottlieb’s index to Dead wrong included, ‘the wording
of the sub-entries, especially, is elegant and descriptive, matching the
tone of the text’ (Stauber, 1998) – while Gottlieb herself wrote of Margie
Towery’s award-winning index to The letters of Matthew Arnold, ‘The
language is lovely’ (M. Anderson, 2002).
48
Bancroft urges consistency of style in subheadings: ‘In some indexes

the use of the author’s words is very effective but they must not be mixed
indiscriminately with the indexer’s own rephrasing’ (Bancroft, 1964).
Wellisch writes: ‘Good narrative indexing provides an opportunity for
the indexer to be creative in paraphrasing the text, using concise and
terse formulations taking up a minimum of space yet conveying the
necessary context for the benefit of users (1991).
And …
The use of and in subheadings to indicate unspecified relationship or
dealings is often deplored as overly vague. However, to abstain from
specification is to avoid excluding any aspect of the relationship, and this
may be what we intend; all aspects may be relevant to the context, meet
to be indicated; then a delimiter is not wanted: specific selection may
entail an incongruous reduction of significance. In indexes to human
lives, and usually stands for general rel ations with or dealings with;
certainly it is a neater phrase than either, as well as usefully open-ended,
allowing a totality of possibilities.
Douglas Matthews writes of and, ‘It has the virtue of blandness,
making only a simple association and passing no judgments’ (Matthews,
personal communication, 1991). It thus solves the problem of bias: ‘and’
has a valuable neutrality compared to ‘hostile feelings towards’, ‘guilty
intentions towards’. The preliminary note to James Thornton’s indexes
to the letters of Charles Dickens includes: ‘the word “and” is sometimes
used to mean “in relation to” or where the connection would otherwise
require a lengthy explanation’ (Knight, 1970).
Articles on language for indexing that have appeared in The Indexer are:
Syntactic and semantic relationships – or: a review of PRECIS.
P. F. Broxis. 10(1), 54–9
Linguistics and indexing. David Crystal. 14(1), 3–7
Indexing a reference grammar. David Crystal. 15(2), 67–72
Natural-language processing and automatic indexing. C. Korycinski &
A. F. Newell. 17(1), 21–9
49
Natural-language processing and automatic indexing: a reply. Kevin

P. Jones. 17(2), 114–15
Bias in indexing and loaded language. Hazel K. Bell. 17(3), 173–7
Selected linguistic problems in indexing within the Canadian context.
Lisa Rasmussen. 18(2), 87–91
For foreign languages, see ‘Countries and languages’ in ‘Contents by

category’ on The Indexer’s website.
Articles on aspect/topic (‘aboutness’) that have appeared in The

Indexer are:
Why indexing fails the researcher. Bella Hass Weinberg. 16(1), 3–6
Academic indexing: what’s it all about? Ross J. Todd. 18(2), 101–4
Subject analysis and indexing. Hanne Albrechtsen. 18(4), 219–24
Is there anybody there? David Crystal. 19(3), 153–4
All in the mind: concept analysis in indexing. John Farrow. 19(4),
243–4
Reverse indexing. David Crystal. 26(1), 14–17
On aboutness. Kate Mertes. 35(2), 77–8
50
6. The perils of partiality
Don’t show your feelings

There is also the question of attitude implied by the language we use.
Choice of terms is a great give-away, as in the famous conjugation, ‘I
practise fine economy / you are somewhat parsimonious / he is a right
old skinflint’. Recording/presenting/interpreting implies the recorder’s
view of the event; and indexers must ensure that the attitudes implied in
the index accord with those of the text.
A feminist dictionary (Kramerae, 1985) proclaims the power of the
indexer to impose their views:
Even the indexing of a book may constitute a subversive
feminist action. An index entry in the 1976 edition of Williams’
Obstetrics, a medical ‘bible’ edited by Jack A. Pritchard and
Paul C. MacDonald, reads CHAUVINISM, MALE, variable
amounts, 1–923; the 1980 edition reads CHAUVINISM,
MALE, voluminous amounts, 1–1102. The preface thanks Signe
Pritchard for her indexing skills.
Piggott quotes from Maclagan’s index to ‘Clemency’ Canning, observing,
‘There is an individuality about some of his entries that would be foreign
to an outsider’s’ (Piggott, 1991):
Hewitt, General: obese and inactive at Meerut
Indian Mutiny: stamping out last embers
Telegram, New Yankee word for ‘telegraphic despatch’
Heralds, College of, ‘slowest moving body known’
These are fine examples of deliberate reinforcement in the index
of the attitudes expressed by the author in the text (the author in this
case being the indexer). This must not be overdone, however: an index
is not the proper place for promoting political hostility or partisanship,
51
as illustrated by the following examples from the opposite extremes of

approval and disapproval.
For sheer, over-the-top attack, look at a few of the 140 subheadings
under Reagan, Ronald Wilson in The clothes have no emperor: a chronicle
of the Reagan years (by Paul Slanksy; Fireside Books, 1989):
blames Carter; blames Congress; blames the media; blames
miscellaneous others; cancerous pimple called ‘friend’ by;
confusion admitted by; detachment from reality imputed to;
disbelief by public of; gloating by enemies of; inability to
answer questions of; macho bluster of; mistakes admitted and
not admitted by; […]
More recently, here are some subheadings appearing under TRUMP,
DONALD in the index to This fight is our fight: The Battle to Save
America’s Middle Class by E. Warren (Collins, 2017):
bait-and-switch; bigotry and; corporate influences on; ‘nasty
woman’ comment of; tax returns and; trickle-down and;
tweetstorms vs.
On the other hand, the autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, a Sicilian
Mafia leader (A man of honour, Deutsch, 1983), includes under his own
entry in the index:
generosity of; handsomeness of; intellect of; language skills of; tact
of; wit of
Testing for validity – following some of these encomia to the only text
indicated, we find that ‘handsomeness of, 175’ leads only to ‘In general,
people considered me an attractive man’; ‘intellect of, 176’, to, ‘They
kindly praised my charm and intelligence’; and ‘wit of, 168’ to, ‘They used
to say that I was the toasting champion of the inner table’ – for which no
example is vouchsafed.
Opposing attitudes conveyed by the wording of subheadings in the
same index are nicely shown by a contrasting pair in Elizabeth Longford’s
biography, Byron (Hutchinson / Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976):
Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord: […] his courtship and marriage,
60–79
52
The perils of partiality
Byron, Annabella, née Milbanke, wife of B. […] vicissitudes of her

marriage, 71–7
The term ‘vicissitudes’ does not occur in the text.
It is not only the opinions of the author, as expressed in the text,
that may be trumpeted loud in the index. Philip Hensher (2004) warns
indexers against indulging their own partialities: ‘The potential for
revenge and mockery in indexing is very high.’ Indeed. An outstanding
example must be the index to A slight and delicate creature, the memoirs
of Margaret Cook (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), surely compiled by
the author, the publicly deserted wife of British Foreign Secretary Robin
Cook. His entry includes the subheadings: outbursts of temper; and
guilt tr ansference; heav y drinking ; weight problems ; sexual difficulties .
And indexing power seems to have gone to the head of the indexer of My
trade: a short history of British journalism by Andrew Marr (Pan, 2005).
It contains the unsolicited entry:
Fallon, Ivan, triumphant and brave journalistic career of,
unaccountably not mentioned.
Matthews, though, records suppressing his own reaction to the text
he was indexing in his ‘most unpleasant commission, an English version
of Hitler’s Mein Kampf ’:
This task almost forced me to abandon professional objectivity,
but I gritted my teeth, suppressed my prejudices, and hope that
I succeeded in turning in an accurate and disinterested product.
(Matthews, 1993)
He wrote there of this need for impartiality:
It was tempting to slant the entries, for example, to make
a subheading ‘poisonous hatred of Jews’; but that would be
inappropriate, while the neutral ‘anti-Semitism’ is exact and, I
think, more effective because it is cooler. The text should say it
all; the index merely directs the reader to where to look.
53
Putting it nicely
I once indexed a book by a hotel proprietor, presented as his diary,
apparently genuinely so. I will not name the book or the author.
The text ran through a year of life in the hotel, using real names. The
staff made frequent – almost daily – insignificant appearances, hovering
perpetually in the background. They could not be omitted from the index,
looming large in the text as a whole; but almost none of their references
merited the distinction of subheadings, so that blocks of undifferentiated,
unavoidable page numbers appeared after those names.
Two staff members, though, were each also accorded some long
page-runs that could well have been separated out from the many
insignificant references and distinguished by subheadings. However,
both passages were, I thought, most intemperately written, suffused with
the diarist/employer’s unrestrained resentment and disapproval.
One named staff member was reported to be in the throes of a
clandestine and passionate affair with [real name given – another
staff member]. A lengthy passage about the second caused me to draw
the attention of the publisher to it with a view to possible libel. The
text presented the employee as guilty of under-charging his visiting
prospective employer by £55, then of gross misconduct. Later he was
referred to as the unscrupulous rat [real name].
Accurate subheadings for these passages would be ‘adulterous affair’,
‘decline in performance’ and ‘dismissed’. But the book is written with
such strong subjective bias, vigorously expressing the author’s hostile
opinions, that I wondered whether such authors’ attitudes should be
reflected/reinforced in an index, or whether indexers should not rather
strive for neutral terms, avoiding value judgements, even when the text
makes its prejudices all too apparent? Moreover, to allot subheadings for
those passages only in the long and otherwise blameless entries for those
two characters would have made them unwarrantably conspicuous.
If I had chosen to modify those index entries, substituting ‘extra-
marital affair’ and ‘last days at [named hotel]’, these terms, far from
matching the tone of the text, would have distorted it, euphemistically.
Should indexers indulge in euphemism any more than in hostile bias,
which we know to be out of order?
54
Linguistic limitation
Some difficulties in devising subheadings arise from the insufficient
terms available to describe human life and its relationships in all their
variety and shades, particularly as our language evolves more slowly than
society changes. A number of terms I have felt the need of in indexing
lives are simply lacking. What, for instance, do we call the period
between meeting and becoming engaged, or co-habiting – often needed
in breaking up main entries into chronological stages? Courtship would
once have met the case – but what now?
What-d’you-call-her?
Social problems abound today as parents wonder how to introduce or
refer to the non-married life and love partners of their children – a
missing term ever more required in modern biographies, especially
for glosses. It was so easy to insert a formal (wife of …) or to provide
subheadings, (marries …), (marriage), (marital relations). When the
ceremonies have been omitted, what terms may we use? A jovial, ‘This
is my non-daughter-in-law’ may do at social occasions, but ‘non-wife’ is
not a suitable term for a printed index. Ours not to censure or condemn,
but (mistress of), (seduces/succumbs to), may appear the only terms
available. ‘Partner’ is pre-empted, already denoting a strictly business
relationship, and its use in an amorous context may lead to embarrassing
confusion.
Penelope Lively expressed the difficulty in her novel, Cleopatra’s
sister (Viking, 1993):
Vivien referred to him as her partner, an expression Howard
detested. He never found any satisfactory term for her: girlfriend
seemed derogatory for a woman in her late thirties. He was
reduced to the circumlocution of ‘the person I share a flat with’,
which contained an ambiguity about sexual orientation, but
woman, in this context, sounded faintly patronizing.
Correspondence in The Times in 1992 following an article entitled
‘A person’s most significant decision’ suggested ‘concubine’, ‘constant
and ever-loving companion’, ‘current attachment’, ‘stablemate’, ‘bidie-in’
55
(Scottish), ‘possleque’ (person of opposite sex sharing living quarters),

‘consort’, ‘sleeping partner’ and ‘co-vivant’ (Diamond, 1992). Indexers,
take your pick.
When women to be included in the index are referred to by their
forenames only, we must either ask the author for the surnames – these
having perhaps been deliberately withheld from the text, tactfully, so
unlikely to be divulged for identification in the index; or, if we index
them just as Jane, Susan, N or M , we need explanatory glosses –
what? We must find non-censorious terms to indicate various passionate
relationships outside marriage – not easy.
Illegitimate is another accurate, sometimes necessary term which
regrettably smacks of disapproval. Relationships portrayed in the text may
be warm and accepting, but our concise index terminology introduces
censorious overtones through the connotations of the language available.
We cannot maintain apparent neutrality in the absence of non-evaluative
language. Authors can be subtle and discreet in their writing, with
implication only; indexers have to condense their meanings to blunt
labels.
Specific groups claim the right to self-identification by names of
their own choice to replace those long accorded them. People with
disabilities is sought to replace disabled, the. In indexes, we need the
terms that are the most concise and the most likely to be sought by
general readers, rather than lengthier, desired ones: different criteria
from those of the author, and, maybe, from those of the subjects of the
text.
In political contexts the choice of term may imply judging between
alternative principles or policies. We must choose to use assassination,
execution or murder; joins terrorists or freedom fighters; in crowd or mob;
sees street protest or riot; helps refugees or illegal immigrants. Possible
choices of term betray allegiance and allot approval or condemnation:
our language is not value-free.
Feminists decry our language as patriarchal, male-dominated,
alienating women, and denying them freedom of discourse, echoing
Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba who declared: ‘It is difficult for a woman
to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to
express theirs’ (Hardy, 1874). Dale Spender, who challenged conven-
tional perceptions of the way we use words in her Man made language
56
(Thorsons, 1985), turned her attention to man-made indexes when she

undertook the indexing of her own Women of ideas: and what men have
done to them (Pandora Press, 1988). She wrote to her sister.
It was one thing to recognise that conventional indexes make
women’s experience and priorities invisible, but quite another
to work out a new conceptualisation. […] I think up ways of
naming from women’s perspective […] We have put in the entry
‘loving husbands’ and along with it ‘Radical men’ and then have
listed Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill for example, and
have also cross-referenced them with ‘champions of women’s
rights’. […] By far the biggest entry is ‘Harassment’ – there must
be a reference on every page […] it is a practical way of saying
that we don’t have to accept the classification system that men
have devised. (Spender, 1986)
Most certainly this index would successfully promulgate the attitudes
of the author – but it hardly seems to promise an efficient finding aid, as
she concludes her letter:
I have deliberately refrained from indexing any men who are
mentioned in the text on the grounds that what is good for the
gander is good for the goose […] how many indexes in books
written by men make women invisible?
The book’s 800 pages include a general index and an index of names, each
seven pages long. The first is provided with a 16-line polemical headnote,
and duly includes the headings:
abuse of women; angry women see disagreeable women;
appropriation of women’s resources; burial of women’s contri-
butions; chivalry, non-existent nature of; contempt for women;
economics, female (sexual economics).
The heading, harassment, indeed has a solid 21 lines of page-references:
a whole ball of string.
57
The constraint of standardization

Another constraint on our terminology and expression may result from
the use of thesauri and ‘predetermined lists of subdivisions in subject
catalogues’, which, Bella Hass Weinberg points out, ‘do not permit exact
specification of the aspect or point-of-view of the topic’ (Weinberg,
1988). How much more clumsy to impose standard terms on individual
experience!
Weinberg distinguished between indexes focusing on aboutness, or
topic – merely specifying the subject of the reference – and aspect, or
comment – reporting the actual comment of the reference, defined by
John Lyons as ‘that part of the utterance which adds something new and
thus communicates information’ (Lyons, 1968). For narrative indexes,
concerned with human lives which are not standardized nor lived
according to predetermined terms and sub-terms, full aspect headings
are necessary to convey the individual content, and resorting to thesauri
other than those of vocabulary alone may prove inapplicable or falsifying.
Assignation to predetermined headings may mean distorting our entries
to fit within the general pattern, rather than emphasizing their individual
content; cramming concepts into ill-fitting hand-me-down coatings
rather than providing them with proper made-to-measure suits.
Standardization is opposed to subtlety and differentiation. The
repeated use of the same subheading to cover several passages of the text
may clumsily mask a subtle variation in apparently similar passages.
Ultimately it is the Whorfian hypothesis, that language determines
thought, that governs our terminology in indexing (Whorf, 1956). His
essay is prefaced by a quotation from Edward Sapir:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone
in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are
very much at the mercy of the particular language which has
become the medium of expression for that society.
The preface to Animal liberation makes the same point regarding linguistic
bias (Singer, 1977):
The English language, like other languages, reflects the prejudices
of its users. So authors who wish to challenge these prejudices
58
are in a well-known type of bind: either they use language that

reinforces the very prejudices they wish to challenge, or else they
fail to communicate with their audience.
‘Have you stopped beating your wife …?’

Linguistic limitation can best be combated by deploying the widest,
most sensitive vocabulary in our search for the precise, concise term
– as George Orwell so potently demonstrated by showing the wholly
opposite effects of restriction and standardization of language in Nineteen
eighty-four (Orwell, 1949). There:
The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought
[…] every year fewer words, and the range of consciousness
always a little smaller. […] What was required was short clipped
words of unmistakable meaning which […] roused the minimum
of echoes in the speaker’s mind. […] The smaller the area of
choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.
Articles on bias in indexing that have appeared in The Indexer are:

Bias in indexing [on John Oldmixon / Laurence Echard].
M. D. Anderson. 9(1), 27–30
Bias in indexing [on Bernard Levin]. 12(1), 54
Bias in indexing [on book on prisons]. Hazel K. Bell. 13(2), 106
Indexes past: Alps and sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino.
13(4), 259
Misrepresentation: passim. Hazel K. Bell. 14(1), 56
A Shavian index. Hazel K. Bell. 15(1), 26–7
Sisterly indexing [on Dale and Lynne Spender]. 15(3), 167
Bias in indexing and loaded language. Hazel K. Bell. 17(3), 173–7
Scholarly search for the truth. M. Mallory & G. Moran. 19(2), 99–101
Whom should we aim to please? Hazel K. Bell. 20(1), 3–5
‘Let no damned Tory’ [John Oldmixon / Laurence Echard]. 33(2), 82–4
59
7. All in order:
a proper arrangement
Having reduced the text to discrete elements, we must reunite and

assemble these in index order, editing and grouping. We have produced
the pieces of our jigsaw, which must now be fitted together: we must
organize the arrangement of these long sequences of subheadings.
Computers can arrange them for indexers in alphabetical order or by
page number. Neither is appropriate for indexes to biographies, where
subheadings may best be arranged chronologically or in some logical, ad
hoc system, as in Latham’s index to Pepys (see below).
Alphabetization
For the system of alphabetization to be used, letter-by-letter or word-by-
word, Neil Fisk, while maintaining that word-by-word order should
not be used for indexing ‘technical or scientific texts or large reference
works’ for which he considered it ‘demonstrably disastrous’, drew a
clear distinction between such firm, documentary texts and ‘memoirs,
biographies, autobiographies and histories’. He called indexers of the
latter type of books ‘stout defenders of the word-by-word method’, as
‘letter-by-letter indexing can occasionally separate items that ought to be
kept together’ (Fisk, 1968). We may choose to arrange our main headings
so; and the treatment of hyphens, symbols, numbers and abbreviations
can be left to our Standards to determine. The crucial question in soft,
narrative indexing at this point is how to arrange the subheadings,
especially in the long entries: a much-disputed one.
60
All in order: a proper arrangement
Subheadings
Latham enthuses about this stage of the indexer’s work (Latham and
Latham, 1980):
Big indexes […] are a minor art-form and combine the pleasures
of a jig-saw puzzle with those of a Victorian paper game. You
play around with hundreds of page references so that they fit
into a design.
There are four possible methods of arrangement of subheadings:
(1) page-order occurrence; (2) chronological; (3) alphabetical; or
(4) thematic/classificatory. Michael Gordon (1983) considered them all:
As to subheadings – is there any virtue in arranging them
alphabetically, other than neatness of presentation? […] Page
order seems to me to make the handling of the book, turning to
and from the index and text, much simpler than the alphabetical
arrangement. […] The virtue of page order is, of course,
partly lost where there is more than one page to an entry; but
alphabetical order seems to me to have no virtue to lose. […] I
prefer chronological order for histories and biographies so that,
for example, people who are entered achieve education before
death. Chronology cannot be consistently maintained since it
does not cover such concepts as character or writings; these are
probably better entered in separate paragraphs, the arrangement
of which can be in page order.
Page order
By far the simplest method for the working indexer is just to leave the
subheadings in the order they occur in the text, unedited. With luck, the
development of the text in narratives will be chronological, so that as we
work through the book, adding entry after entry, the result untampered-
with will be in order of occurrence in the action. Edwin Holmstrom
(1965) advocated this arrangement for ‘a narrative literary work’:
The plan which is easiest for the indexer to follow, and which
also is convenient to the user of the index, is to put the
61
subheadings in the same sequence as they occur in the text.

[…] This is a satisfactory arrangement for the purpose, because
in a narrative work the order of the page numbers will generally
correspond with the time order of the events reported and
this is as helpful an order as any for the reader to follow when
searching for whichever items having a ‘wanted relevance’ he
requires.
This not only is the easiest way in which to leave each block of
subheads, but can be delegated to the computer to carry out. It has a
certain justifying logic, and is the method used in the Wheatley-winning
index to the biography of ‘Clemency’ Canning (Piggott, 1991). (The
entry for the main character there, though, is divided into paragraphs:
career [four columns, ending mentioned briefly]; appear ance; char acter ;
opinions .) Complications may arise with this ordering of subheadings
when later page references are added to an earlier heading which fits
them also; runs of references become in order of occurrence of the first
number in each run, constantly going back to start again at an earlier
point for the next subhead.
But there may well be snarls in this fairly chronological sequence,
if, for instance, the first chapter reviews the whole story, or opens with
a climactic moment of the biographee’s career – even his funeral – or
there are recapitulations of earlier events, or developments or themes are
successively retraced through a period. Wellisch observes, ‘Alas, frightful
examples of pseudo-chronological arrangement of subheadings in page
order are all too often found’ (1991). The results of this method have
sometimes been scarifyingly castigated, as when Bernard Levin devoted
an entire Times article to ‘the full, almost heroic awfulness’ of the index
to Ian Ker’s biography of Cardinal Newman (Clarendon Press, 1988, 762
pages), complaining particularly that ‘the hundreds of references [under
the entry for the main character] are not in alphabetical order at all, but
only in the order in which they appear in the book’ (Levin, 1989).
An extensive page order/chronological entry for the main character
is found in the index to Vanessa Bell by Frances Spalding (Ticknor &
Fields, 1983). The text is of 363 pages; the index, 13 (in two columns),
of which over two and a half are occupied by the entry for Bell, Vanessa.
It is divided into paragraphs headed: life (2 pages); rel ationships (half a
62
column); art (over half a page). The subheadings, each chronologically

(= page order) arranged, repeat the exact terminology of the text, with
no attempt at condensation or grouping together of like instances (nor
any abbreviations). They include, sic:
grubs among books; cajoles Virginia; bawdiness; changing taste;
learns to absorb suffering; in rebellious mood; suspicious of
insincerity; her sensuality aroused; growing taste for strong
colour; explains Bloomsbury’s lack of prescience; callous
to Roger; inspires Virginia; moves away from abstraction;
horrified by Omega-decorated flat; doubt and reassurance;
catches moth for Julian; weeds furiously at Charleston; free,
careless, airy, indifferent; edginess with Virginia; dreaded;
acute delight in seeing Julian in Roger’s company; stunned by
Roger’s death; declares politics and art don’t mix
This is surely over-egging of the pudding, leaving hardly a need to
read the full(er) text. Such a dutiful, un-reformatted digest of the whole,
seeming determined to lose no golden word, suggests an author’s own
index. (Two pages of acknowledgements in this book do not include
mention of the index.)
Reviewing Nigel Nicolson’s autobiography, Long life (Putnam’s,
1998), Penelope Fitzgerald (1998) observes that he arranges it ‘rather
oddly – not in order of time but thematically, with chapters allocated
(more or less) to his many occupations’ (Fitzgerald, 1998).
Chronology observed
True chronological order, though, achieved by diligent editing, faithfully
reproduces the actual order of events as they occurred in the characters’
lives, not just as they are recorded in the text. This should make it simple
for the reader to locate items, whose order of occurrence should be
guessable if not already known. A. S. Byatt (2001) writes:
The biographer, Jenny Uglow, speaks with pleasure of good
chronological guides to lives, to be found within indexes, and the
sheer unuseful irritation produced by rendering these subentries
in alphabetical form – beginning with ‘Aunt Amy’s visit’ not
because it came early, but because it begins with A.
63
Knight preaches, of chronological subheadings in histories and

biographies: ‘Their order in the index must be kept strictly chrono-
logical, irrespective of the page-reference order in the text’ (1979).
Chronologically arranged entries, moreover, are stylistically pleasing:
they can be read through themselves as minor narratives, forming
coherent wholes and conveying the tenor of the text. Two famous
examples of such narrative index entries come from R. C. Latham’s 1983
index to Pepys’s diary (Latham and Matthews, 1983), and F. A. Pottle’s of
1950 to Boswell’s London Journal (Boswell, 1950) (quoted here without
page numbers):
bagwell – , wife of William: her good looks; P plans to seduce;
visits; finds her virtuous; and modest; asks P for place for
her husband; P kisses; she grows affectionate; he caresses;
she visits him; her resistance collapses in alehouse; amorous
encounters with: at her house […]
Lewis, Mrs (Louisa), actress. JB to call Louisa in journal; receives
JB; JB visits; JB’s increased feeling for; JB discusses love with;
JB anticipates delight with; JB lends two guineas to; disregards
opinion of world; discusses religion with JB; JB entreats to be
kind; uneasiness of discourages JB; JB declares passion for;
promises to make JB blessed; […] makes assignation with JB;
consummation with JB interrupted; […] JB likes better and
better; JB’s felicity delayed; […] JB afraid of a rival; JB feels
coolness for; […] JB incredulous at infection from; JB enraged
at perfidy of; […] JB asks his two guineas back […]
The terms chosen for these subheadings are most felicitous; the
arrangement is perfect. Note too the profusion of prepositions, aiding
the natural narrative flow.
The major difficulty in arranging subheadings chronologically is
what to do with successive but separate references to the same topic:
someone’s personal appearance at various stages of their life; repeated
visits to the same place; an annual ceremony. Grouping these together
will lose the chronological sequence of the whole, constantly jerking
forward and back to start again; leaving them in their correct moment
in time will necessitate frequent, spaceconsuming repetition of the
subheading as well as separation of the references.
64
Blocks of subheadings may be chronologically divided into groups or

stages of life, rather than individually specified, giving one subheading to
five or so co-occurring references. Easiest of all is to subdivide into years
by date – these take little space, are tidy divisions, and easy to establish.
But this division is best used when the reader may be expected to have
enough relevant knowledge for the dates alone to convey anything of
the likely events covered in that period. Except for histories, only a few
special cases, such as 1914–18 or 1939–45, would convey something to
the user without needing glosses or added details; but in biographies
dates of special significance in the life in question suggest little without
qualification. Subheadings adducing the known in this way are easier to
compile than those that need explanation, as subheadings probably will,
in the private lives recounted in biographies.
Collocation also achieves a classification that may be helpful. Latham
explained, of his index to Pepys (Latham and Latham, 1980):
One of the principles of the design was to gather as many
references as possible into clusters – under general terms such
as food, drink, dress and so on – so that the Index could enable
the diary to serve as a book of reference.
Bella Weinberg is opposed to page/chronological order for
biographical indexes (Weinberg, 1989), suggesting: ‘Indexes should
complement the logical arrangement of a book rather than replicate it’,
and recommending the application of the principles of chain indexing to
justify entries such as
Birth: [Biographee].
Stephen Leacock (1942) complained that ‘a simple listing of the facts
as found in the text will produce an illogical order so that “many events
of his life get shifted out of their natural order”’. For example:
John Smith: born. p. 1: born again. p. 1: […] mother born. p. 4:
mother’s family leave Ireland. p. 5: still leaving it. p. 6: school.
p. 7: dies of pneumonia and enters Harvard. p. 9: eldest son
born. p. 10: marries. p. 11: […]
65
The alphabetical way

Alphabetical arrangement of subheadings in indexes to biographies
appears to have some advantages; sometimes, even, reviewers (such as
Levin) deplore its not having been used. Neil Fisk (1968) pleaded for it:
I do sometimes wish that these indexes [‘of biographies and other
such works’] too could be alphabetical throughout, subheadings
as well as the main headings. […] I often think I could find
[examples of the more bizarre assertions or odder acts of Sir
George Sitwell (in Sir Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography, Left hand,
right hand [1945])] more quickly if the group of entries under his
name were arranged alphabetically.
Carey, though, defended the opposite case, writing of his own indexing
of Haldane of Cloan:
Why must subheadings always, according to some authorities,
be alphabetical? May not rule just occasionally give way to
common sense? (Carey, 1961)
As alphabetical order will almost certainly be the arrangement of the
main headings, there is a certain elegant consistency in carrying the same
principle through to the subheadings. Also, computers can manage the
entire operation this way. It is admirably suitable for works where the
subheadings are those obviously to be expected: climate / geography /
history / population of a country, for instance.
There are disadvantages, though, to alphabetical arrangement of
subheads in biographies. Their wording may not be the expected version,
in such a subjective field, and the keywords in run-on narrative style
may not be brought to the front. This order may also lead to absurd
variance from both chronology and logic, as in Leacock’s example
above. Douglas Matthews explains his reasons for usually avoiding
alphabetical arrangements under main headings (Matthews, personal
communication, 1991):
The terms (unlike scientific ones, which are precise and specific)
are adopted, even arbitrary, and so seem no more helpful to the
reader than any other order. To take a hypothetical instance: in
a book on Cromwell, his warts might be the subject of comment;
66
and the indexer might make a subheading under that word. On

the other hand he may prefer to put all physical features together
under appear ance or physical features or disfigurements or skin
condition , and so the reader might not light on the reference to
warts, overlooking the form used.
For the thematic/classificatory method, see next chapter.
Articles on alphabetization that have appeared in The Indexer are:

Memorandum on the method of alphabetization laid down by the Draft
British Standard for Indexes. Neil R. Fisk. 3(3), 93–4
Law and order, alphabetical. Michael Gordon. 13(4), 255–6
The origins of the order of the letters. David Diringer. 6(2), 54–8
The alphabetization of prepositions in indexes. Hans H. Wellisch. 12(2),
90–2
Alphabetization in indexes. J. Hartley, L. Davies & P. Burnhill. 12(3),
149–53
An alternative index. Hazel K. Bell. 25(4), 255–6
Facilitas inveniendi: the alphabetical index as a knowledge
management tool. Helmut Zedelmaier. 25(4), 235–42
Some early guidance on arrangement and cross-referencing in an
index. H. B. Wheatley. C18:15
Alphabetico-specific indexing. Alan Walker. 36(1), 9–13
67
8. Theme by theme
A reviewer of a biography referred to ‘the first problem of the biographer,

whether to follow a strict chronology or to pursue particular themes’
(Briggs, 1990). The indexer of a biography has to make the same
decision. This last, fourth way to arrange subheadings in narrative
indexes requires more work than alphabetical, chronological, or page
number order. It is the method adopted for the long entries in most of
the indexes cited in this booklet. This is logical or thematic grouping of
subheads, into paragraphs with such headings as family, char acter , career ,
rel ationships , letters , works , as appropriate for each book (designated
‘prime subheads’ by Douglas Matthews). Within these sections, entries
appear as further subheadings – in fact, they are sub-subs of the main
headings. I use small capitals for the paragraph headings, to make them
stand out.
Christopher Phipps (2012) recommends this method, suggesting
that in biographies, subheadings under the name of the leading character
‘comprise different types of terms, which can be classified into a range
of categories, including: actions; characteristics; relationships; views;
works’.
Douglas Matthews adopted this method in working on Peter
Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens (Matthews, personal communication,
1991):
In this huge book I soon realized that it needed some order
under DICKENS , CHARLES , because of his dominance in the
text, and adopted an arrangement under his name into prime
subheads: all designed to make it easier to use. Within these
subdivisions the order is by occurrence within the text, which is
generally chronological in such a narrative biography.
The note preceding the index to the biography of Anthony Eden
begins:
68
Theme by theme
With the exception of the entries for Anthony Eden and his
immediate family, the arrangement of subheadings in the index
is chronological, following the order in which subjects first occur
in the text. Reference to the diaries, letters, relationships and
views of those indexed are grouped at the end of the sequence of
subheadings, in the entry for each person (James, 1988).
Examples of paragraphed subheadings

These are the paragraph headings used to divide the entries for the main
characters in a selection of indexes to biographies:
Jane Austen by Claire Tomalin; Viking, 1998
AUSTEN, JANE: (first paragraph of family and early life); adult life;
rel ationships; writings: letters; novels; verses (one-page entry)
A life of Gerald Brenan: the interior castle by J. Gathorne-Hardy; Sinclair-

Stevenson, 1994
BRENAN, GERALD: (long first paragraph, biographical, with
no heading); awards; finances; libr ary; personal char acteristics;
rel ationships; writing; letters; poetry; published works (one and a half
pages)
Benjamin Britten: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter; Faber and
Faber, 1982
In the 23-page General Index: britten, [edward] benjamin: life
(4 columns); char acter, attributes and interests (3 columns). There
is also a second, detailed, nearly 8-page ‘Index of Britten’s Works’ (for
more on this, see page 87).
Rich: the life of Richard Burton by Melvyn Bragg; Hodder & Stoughton,
1988
BURTON, RICHARD: career; char acteristics and tastes;
acting; wealth; rel ationships; marriages; writings (nearly one page,
triple-column)
‘Clemency’ Canning by Michael Maclagan; Macmillan, 1962
career ; appear ance; char acter ; opinions (three pages)
69
Winston S. Churchill […] vol. 2, Young statesman, 1901–1919 by

Randolph S. Churchill; Heinemann, 1967
CHURCHILL, WINSTON: char acteristics; education; finances;
health; hobbies; military career ; political interests
Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990

DICKENS, CHARLES: biogr aphy and personal life (3+ columns);
char acteristics (2 columns); health; ideas, beliefs and opinions; liter ary
life and endeavours (1.5 columns); portr aits; public readings; speeches;
theatricals; tr avels abroad (total 5.5 pages)
Anthony Eden by Robert Rhodes James; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986

EDEN, ANTHONY: four personal paragraphs come first – ancestry;
early love affairs; marriage; children ; then seven paragraphs in
chronological order, each representing a stage of Eden’s political
career, including career; early interest in politics; foreign secretary;
then tributes, honours and awards, broadcasts, speeches, writings
(journalism / family letters / memoirs / three book titles); then, in
alphabetical order, seven personal paragraphs – appear ance and dress,
art collection, char acter and personality; finances; health; personal
rel ationships; rel ationships with parliamentary colleagues gener ally;
personal and official papers; biogr apher ’s assessment of (total 33
paragraphs)
T. S. Eliot by Peter Ackroyd; Hamish Hamilton, 1984
ELIOT, THOMAS STEARNS: biogr aphy (nearly 4 columns,
subheadings in page order); char acter (1.5 columns, subheadings in
alphabetical order); opinions .75 column, alphabetical order); writings
(six columns, subheadings in alphabetical order, some with sub-subs in
alphabetical order)
T. S. Eliot: a memoir by Robert Sencourt; Garnstone Press, 1971
ELIOT, THOMAS STEARNS: (first a half-column-long paragraph
of biographical events, with subheadings in chronological order);
rel ationships (in alphabetical order); religion (with subheadings –
early views, interests; conversion to C. of E.; baptism, confirmation;
as Anglican); char acteristics; recreations; interests (cats; Eastern
70
Theme by theme
thought; literary; philosophy; poetical; politics); prose works; pl ays;

poems; letters (total one and a half pages)
Gladstone by Roy Jenkins; Macmillan, 1995

GLADSTONE, WILLIAM EWART: activities and recreations;
char acteristics; education; finances; health; honours; intellectual
interests; personal ; political life; (nearly four columns); religious life;
tr avels; works (total over four pages)
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD by James Boswell; Clarendon Press,
1934–64
JOHNSON, SAMUEL: (‘begins with a chronological list of the
principal events of the subject’s life, with page-references; there follow
four numbered alphabetical series’): i gener al; ii letters; iii letters
written to johnson; iv `writings (including diaries …) and matters
rel ating to them ’ (17 paragraphs)
John Keats: a life by Stephen Coote; Hodder & Stoughton, 1995
KEATS, JOHN: biogr aphy; personal; relics; works (one and a half
pages)
John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 2: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 by
Robert Skidelsky; Macmillan, 1992
KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD: career and activities; char acteristics;
personal and private life; views and opinions; see under title for
individual publications by jmk (one page)
Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind by David Cesarani; Heinemann,
1998
KOESTLER, ARTHUR: (long first paragraph, biographical, with no
heading); personal; rel ationships; reputation and status; lectures;
works (ending see also titles of publications in which works by AK
appeared)
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life by Claire Tomalin; Viking, 1987

‘MANSFIELD, KATHERINE’ (KATHERINE MANSFIELD
BEACHAMP): (more than 3 columns with no subheading); physical
appear ance; health; char acter ; works
71
Michelangelo: a biography by George Bull; Viking, 1995

MICHELANGELO (Michelagniolo Buonarroti): appear ance; artistic
career ; artistic tr aining; birth and early years; critics of; death;
family; finances; friendships; health; homes; military engineer ; patrons;
personal char acteristics; politics; religion and: works ( architectur al );
works (paintings and dr awings); works (sculptures); writings (total
seven-column entry)
Sean O’Casey: a life by Garry O’Connor; Hodder & Stoughton, 1988
O’CASEY, SEAN: (first paragraph, general biography and career, no
heading); attitudes; rel ationships; works (over one and a half pages –
three columns).
Pepys: a biography by Richard Ollard; Hodder & Stoughton 1974
PEPYS, SAMUEL: personal life; work and career; qualities and
char acter ; health; finances and rewards; interests and tastes;
residences; politics; religion; journeys; writing
Bertrand Russell by Caroline Moorehead; Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992

RUSSELL, BERTRAND: biogr aphy; char acteristics; attitudes, beliefs
and pleasures; writings (two and a half pages)
Bernard Shaw Volume I 1856–1898: The Search for Love by Michael

Holroyd; Chatto & Windus, 1988
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD: (a two-column long first paragraph,
biographical, with no heading); shaw on (topics listed alphabetically);
shaw ’s letters and communications to (recipients listed alphabetically,
with topics as subheadings – more than two columns); works (nearly
two columns)
Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky; Hodder & Stoughton, 1995
STALIN: biogr aphy; personal; rel ationships; writings (nearly one page)
The order in which these paragraphs are arranged varies; it is not

necessarily alphabetical. Within the paragraphs, also, different orders of
subheadings may be adopted – some alphabetical, some chronological.
In his index to Haldane of Cloan, Carey gave Haldane, Richard Burdon
72
Theme by theme
‘an entry of his own, in two parts, the first comprising about a dozen of
the main events of his career, in chronological order; the second headed
Personal traits and listed in alphabetical order’ (Carey, 1961).
For the Dickens index, Douglas Matthews uses order of occurrence
with the paragraphs headed:
biogr aphy and personal life; health; liter ary life and endeavours;
portr aits; public readings; and theatricals
– each of which is set run-on; and alphabetical order under:
char acteristics; ideas, beliefs and opinions; speeches (by place
given); and tr avels abroad .
The alphabetically arranged paragraphs are set indented, including

their own sub-subheadings and many cross-references.
Of Powell’s index to Boswell, de Beer (1967) writes:
the entries for London, Oxford, Pope and Shakespeare are each
divided into two or more alphabetical series […] the entry for
the Lives of the poets […] is divided into five somewhat discursive
series relating to the growth and fortunes of the book. The
entries for Burke and Goldsmith are each divided into two
alphabetical sections, using heavy type initials. […] those for
Boswell and Johnson […] begin with a chronological list of the
principal events of the subject’s life.
Tracing the themes

Each long entry in an index represents a single strand through the book,
which must be individually traced in turn when that entry is edited,
going back through the whole work looking for the overall pattern of
the references to the one person. Reading the book thus repeatedly and
selectively, one is working in the way described by A. S. Byatt as that of
A-level literature study (Byatt, 1978):
One was required to discuss the function of characters in the
plot, and […] what extra individuality they had, what intrinsic
nature […] the other thing […] was trace recurrent images.
73
Tracing one major character and theme after another thus singly
through a book to finalize its index entry reminds me of preparing for
examinations on literature. This process is described by Thomas Hardy
in his diary entry for 3 June 1882:
as in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain
pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in
life the seer should watch that pattern amid general things which
his idiosyncracy moves him to observe, and describe that alone.
(Hardy, 1882)
74
9. Mighty main characters
As the fish said, ‘what water?’

It is, of course, in the treatment of the main character of a biography
that the difficulties of long entries with multiple subheadings become
most acute.
Leave it out?
Margie Towery (2017) comments, ‘There is an old idea that the metatopic
itself should never appear in the index, because if it did, you would have
to index the whole book under that single main heading’. There have
been distinguished advocates of the simple omission of such entries for
biographies.
Gordon Carey denounced long entries for the main character of
a biography as ‘overloading’, suggesting they should be omitted, or
restricted to entries which could not go under any other heading, such
as his birth, character, honours, rather than producing ‘column after
column after column of sub-entries, extending as likely as not to several
pages – classified, perhaps, in three or four separate sections, but even so
needing an auxiliary index to help you find any individual object of search’
(Carey, 1963). He declared, ‘When indexing a biography […] I start
with a predisposition against an individual entry for the central figure,
primarily because the whole book is about him’. He applied this principle
of dispersal in indexing The memoirs of Lord Ismay, and placed at the top of
the index, ‘as a form of shock-absorber’, he tells us, this note (Carey, 1961):
In order to avoid the difficulty and delay in reference induced by
several pages of subheadings under the main heading, ISMAY,
LORD, the author’s activities have been indexed under the
persons, places, institutions, etc. to which they relate, his name,
wherever appropriate, being indicated by I.
75
Knight (1964) wrote approvingly of Carey’s precepts, saying that his

article:
showed how utterly unnecessary were most of the subheadings
which would normally clutter up the several pages of index
devoted to a synopsis of his entire career; the vast majority
could be far more conveniently placed, and were more likely to
be looked for, under appropriate separate entries.
Margaret Anderson (1971) also quoted Carey with approval,
recommending that:
Under X’s name in the index are placed only such personal
matters as his birth, marriage, and death, his characteristics,
hobbies, illnesses, and honours.
Colin Matthew abjured altogether an entry for the main character in his
award-winning index, stating:
An important preliminary decision was not to have an entry
for Gladstone himself. This would have been so large as to be
extremely difficult to navigate in, and would have repeated most
of the other entries in the Subject Index. (Matthew, 1995)
The Wheatley Panel made no mention of this omission in making its
award to this index. Likewise, Alan Walker made no entry for the main
character in his medal-winning index to former Prime Minister John
Howard’s autobiography Lazarus rising, as reported on page 23.
Abrupt compromises between full index entries for the main character
of biographies and none are shown in Horace Walpole (1717–1797): A
Biographical Study by Lewis Melville (Hutchinson & Company, 1930),
where this unusual entry appears:
Walpole, Horace. The subject of this memoir.
And in the index to Edmund Gosse: a literary landscape by Ann
Thwaite (OUP, 1985):
Gosse, Edmund, see individual entries, e.g. ancestry, inaccuracy,
etc.; also titles of his books
76
Mighty main characters
Similarly on these accurate but uncluttered lines is the entry in the

Everyman, 1906 edition of The diary of Samuel Pepys:
PEPYS, SAMUEL, Vol. I: 1 January 1660–31 March 1664; Vol.
II: 1 April 1664–30 June 1667; Vol. III: 1 July 1667–31 May
1669.
Chapter headings may prove suitable to use as subheadings for really
broad divisions.
Knight even censured the first winner of the Wheatley Medal
for including in the three-page entry for Lord Canning, divided into
four sections, a four-column first section, career , deeming it ‘really
unnecessary since it is practically a synopsis of the entire text’ (Knight,
1964). Personally, as reader, I would welcome such a synopsis, easy to
find one’s way through.
Simple removal of entries from under the main character will not
solve the problems of extended continuity and grouping of multiple
subheadings as they apply to other major characters in the book. Elizabeth
Pepys and James Boswell claimed nearly equal time with their heroes;
even the entry for Elizabeth Taylor in Richard Burton’s biography was
divided into paragraphs headed: career; rel ationships; char acteristics;
wealth and films, in a nearly two-column entry for a secondary character.
Spouses and colleagues can run the main characters of biographies
close seconds, thirds and subsequents. Washing one’s hands of the main
character will solve the problem of voluminous subheadings under single
entries only if extended so far as to omit all major topics and index only
minor ones – hardly helpful.
There is an opposite tendency from the omission of an entry for the
main character in a biography in its index, while fully treating all other
characters – compared with those who give full detailed breakdown
for the main character, but leave strings for the rest. An example of the
second type is the index to Barbara Pym’s diary, which has a full, detailed
entry for Pym herself, but leaves long undifferentiated strings for Henry
Harvey, Philip Larkin, Robert Liddell, Oxford, Richard Roberts, Robert
Smith, and Hilary Walton, all of whom are provided with glosses rather
than subheadings (Pym, 1985). Equally determined that no reference to
the main character shall be missed seems the indexer (/autobiographer?)
77
of Winston S. Churchill’s My Early Life (Hamlyn, 1930). His entry, more

than a column long, concludes with a single line:
and passim.
Carey suggested that most entries for the main character could go
under other headings – for the hero’s marriage, you look for his wife’s
name in the index, which will have become the same as his (Carey, 1961).
But what of other close relationships, with people of different, unknown
names – how to locate these? Knight complained that ‘in the carefully
compiled American index’ to Boswell in search of a wife ‘it is not pretty to
find’ 38 references to catching, escaping from, or being treated for, the
pox, under BOSWELL , and that ‘these had better been relegated to an
entry under the letter V’ (Knight, 1966). But if the reader did not already
know what ailed him, they would not think to consult V for details
of Boswell’s health and sickness. Transferring the main character’s
references to other entries will indeed avoid long cumulations, but, like
alphabetical arrangement of subheadings, will be helpful only to those
who already know exactly what subjects they should look for, and how
they will be expressed.
Piggott (1991), discussing the Maclagan index to the Canning
biography, suggests:
If the entry under the main character is very long, pin-pointing a
specific topic, even when category headings have been used, can
be difficult. It seems to me that double-entry is the only solution.
However, there are those who see much virtue in a long, detailed entry
for the main character. Christopher Phipps (2012) suggests:
Done well, a leading character’s index entry can provide a
really useful and easily navigable – even readable – synopsis of
their life. It can also pull together scattered mentions of their
attributes and characteristics which build into a cogent and
accessible thumbnail sketch that might not readily be found
elsewhere in the text.
Do Mi Stauber (2004) designates the main subject of a text the
metatopic, identifying it as ‘the structural center of the index: every
78
single heading […] will be implicitly related to it’. An index structure to

cope with this is suggested by Towery (2017):
I view the metatopic main heading as a useful place for any
reader […] to start an index search. […] The metatopic main
heading can be a window into the structure of the index and
thus the text. Within this key entry array, I generally place two
kinds of information: (1) subheadings that gather disparate bits
of information that may not serve as main entries themselves
(alternatively, some or all of the subheadings may also be double-
posted to main headings, depending) and (2) cross-references to
the most important main headings in the book.
Hero-treatment
Editing the entry for the main character in a biography I always leave
to the last – irrespective of his initial – dealing with this when I have
acquired maximum familiarity with the text by finalizing all the other
entries. Settling the main character’s entry usually entails trailing right
through the book again, tracing this major theme.
The paragraph headings used for the entries for the main characters
in twenty-two biographies are given on pages 69–72; for Charles Dickens,
on pages 70, 73, 86 and 99; for Samuel Pepys, on pages 64, 65, 72 and
100–1. Here are some further examples.
An interesting and complex treatment of the main character is found
in the 21-page index to Berlioz: volume I: the making of an artist by David
Cairns (Deutsch, 1989; 563 pages). It is an original and ingenious index,
whose author clearly knows just where he wishes his emphasis placed,
and which must result from close study and analysis of the text. The
indexer receives prominent credit: Professor G. D. West. The entry for
‘Berlioz, Hector (HB)’ takes over four pages, set run-on, divided into
headed (in italics) paragraphs, some having their own subheadings. Here
are some of these:
America, Asia, and the South Seas, HB’s lifelong passion for;
Anatomy, HB’s early interest in (one page-reference only);
Ancestry (19–21); Appearance; Birth (one page ref.); Branchu,
79
Mme, influence on HB; Character (subheadings alphabetically

arranged after the first entry, ‘recollections’); Childhood
(nothing known up to the age of 12 years – one page ref.);
Composers influenced by HB (alphabetically arranged); Early
instruction in music; Education; Father, HB’s relationship with
(18-line entry with chronological arrangement of subheadings);
Ill-health; Influences on HB – literature (43 lines); Influences
on HB – music (36 lines); Instruments, HB’s knowledge of and
ability to play; Journalism; Law, HB refuses to study instead of
medicine (two references); Love Life (this paragraph employs
the only bold type in the index, for the names of five ladies, in
alphabetical order, each with her array of sub-subheadings);
Works by HB – music, complete, fragmentary, and not extant
(nearly three columns)
A fuller critique of this index appears in The Indexer (Bell, 1990).
Moral desperado: a life of Thomas Carlyle by Simon Heffer
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1995) has 383 pages of text and a 14-page
index. (I have been unable to trace the name of the indexer – as so sadly
often.) The entry in the index for CARLYLE, THOMAS (entered sic, in
full capitals) fills three pages. It consists of 40 subheadings, indented,
in alphabetical order, many of them followed by several subheadings,
set run-on, also alphabetically. Some sample entries (without page
numbers here) are:
birth and early years; accent; appearance; biographies of;
correspondence and papers see …; employments (five
sub-subheadings); finances (14); health (17); literary style (18);
personal characteristics (ambition; authoritarian; earnestness;
entertainingly ill-natured; exaggeration; ingratitude; intolerance;
sarcasm; self-pity; selfishness; sense of humour; sensitivity;
shopping disliked; shyness; thoughtlessness towards Jane;
unaffected by praise or censure; ungraciousness; want of
elegance; as a youth; see also above interests); personal
philosophy (16 sub-subheadings); political philosophy (a third
of a column); religious views (a quarter-column); reputation
during life (quarter-column); reputation following death (5
sub-subheadings); works (a full column).
80
The biography, Cyril Connolly: a nostalgic life by Clive Fisher

(Macmillan, 1995), has what seems an interesting and original treatment
of the main character in the index. First, the entry for Connolly, Cyril
Vernon, which is over a page long, is made conspicuous by leaving line
spaces before and after that entry, just as one does between alphabetical
sections of an index, making this entry into a section on its own –
unexceptionably, it seems to me.
Then, while the rest of the index is set with all subheadings run-on,
Connolly’s own entry is an exception to this. His entry is divided into
paragraphs, with each indented paragraph (sub)heading followed by
its own run-on subheadings (that is, sub-subs to the main heading).
These are ordered chronologically for the first paragraph heading, ‘Life’;
alphabetically for all the rest. Here is a list of the paragraph headings, as
they are set, with some of their attendant subs:
life: family background; birth; childhood; […] 60th birthday;
70th birthday; illness and death [19 lines of run-on subheads]
appearance
art collection
book collection
dress
entertaining
finances [16 lines of run-on subheads]
health
homes [13 lines of subheads]
honours [2 lines]
lifestyle: bachelor flat; country style; dreams; gardening;
home decoration; pets; servants; South of France
love affairs: Anne Dunn; Betty Mossop; Bobbie Longden;
Caroline Blackwood; Diana; Elaine Tynan; Janetta Woolley; […]
schoolboys; […] Sonia Orwell; Texas professor’s wife [12 lines]
politics
wartime
works (completed and projected) [nearly a column of subheads]
There is, moreover, another unusual feature in the layout of this
entry. All the turnover (wrap-around) lines are run full out left; only
the paragraph headings are indented. The spaces before these break
81
up the block of text and make them easy to spot. Much space is saved
in this way, as otherwise most of the lines of these two-plus columns
would have had to be double-indented as sub-subheadings. The line
spaces before and after this main entry help it to stand out as a separate
section with a layout of its own. (The indexer, presumably responsible
for such a splendid initiative, receives no acknowledgement in the
volume.)
There are long and complex entries for the main (literary) character
in both volumes of Brian Boyd’s biography: Vladimir Nabokov: the
Russian years and Vladimir Nabokov: the American years (Chatto &
Windus, 1990; 1992). They have respectively 582 and 758 pages of text,
each provided with a 25-page index. The entries for the main character in
both extend over more than six pages. The heading in the index:
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1899–1977)
is followed each time by its own prefatory note:
(entries are arranged within the categories: Art and Thought; Life
and Character; Works)
The sections are arranged alphabetically under these headings, set
run-on, with a new paragraph for each new initial letter. Thus, in the
Russian volume:
Art and Thought: [nearly two pages]
– afterlife: and father’s death; – art: and the beyond, and
generosity of life, as image on limits of consciousness
transcended, …
– the beyond: early attempts to render; – biography …
– causation; – censorship; – chess …
– death: as possible transcending of prison of self …
– emigration, Russian, as subject …
Life and Character: [two pages]
– as actor: …
– birth of …
– at Cambridge
– as dancer
82
Works: [over three pages]

– Ada: composition of, sources of, `The Texture of Time’ …
– `Bachman’: German serialization of;
– `A Bad Day’;
– Bend Sinister …
– Camera Obscura: composition of, Czech translation of, English
translation of …
And in the American volume –
Art and Thought: [one page]
– aesthetics; afterlife; America, hesitation to use as milieu in
fiction; America, as theme in autobiography; …
– censorship …
– death …
– `enchantment’ …
Life and Character: [a little over two pages]
– accomplishment, sense of; airplanes, wariness of …
Works: [three and a quarter pages]
– Ada: analysis of …
– `The Ballad of Longwood Glen’
– Camera Obscura.
Lolita and Pale Fire are each accorded two thirds of a column.
Quentin Bell’s two-volume Virginia Woolf was published by the
Hogarth Press in 1972, and as a single paperback publication by Triad/
Paladin in 1987. Volume I, ‘Virginia Stephen’, there runs from page 1
to 216; volume 2, ‘Mrs Woolf ’, from a new page 1 to 259; then come
reference lists and indexes for both volumes: 28 pages of indexes. The
entry for Woolf, Virginia, takes one and a half pages of the first index,
two of the second. Both parts are divided into numbered paragraphs, the
subheadings within them set run-on in order of occurrence in the text.
The paragraph headings of the first are: I – Life and Opinions; II –
Literary Work; of the second: I – Descriptions of her person, occupations
and character; II – Pathography; III – Literary work (with nine lines
following see also); IV – Literary friendships (four lines following see also);
V – Other Personal Relationships (seven lines ); VI – Public affairs; VII –
General (from social trials of her engagement to thanks for butter).
83
Articles on the indexing of the main character in a biography that

have appeared in The Indexer are:
Indexing a biography [Professor Soddy]. L. E. C. Hughes. 1(4), 111
No room at the top. G. V. Carey. 2(3), 120–3
‘Clemency’ Canning. G. N. Knight. 4(1), 19–20/29
Indexing the life of Sir Winston Churchill. G. N. Knight. 5(2), 58–63
Indexing biographies: the main character. Hazel K. Bell. 17(1), 43–4
Authors as their own indexers [‘Clemency’ Canning]. Mary Piggott.
17(3), 161–6
Distortion and mutilation – it can happen to us [Charles Dickens].
Hazel K. Bell, 18(1), 40–1
An indexer’s life of Johnson. Christopher Phipps. 30(3), 114–19
Navigating The English friend. Susan Curran. 30(3), 119–24
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10. The works
Listing volumes
There are particular difficulties in indexing books about the lives of those
who themselves produce literary or musical works. Douglas Matthews,
indexing a 44-volume edition of the writings of Daniel Defoe (Pickering
and Chatto) that included several histories and memoirs, took this
approach:
Works by authors other than Defoe appear under the author’s
name, but Defoe’s own works, when cited, appear directly under
title. I believe that distributing his titles in this way makes for
greater clarity particularly when sub-dividing his individual
works, whereas listing them all under his name would make for
a rather clumsy block of entries all in one place. Book titles all
appear in italic, and to distinguish Defoe’s works from other
italicized headings (such as periodicals) I add the tag (DD) to
identify the work as Defoe’s. (Matthews, 2004)
Titles
The first problem is whether to disperse titles through the index or
group them under the author’s name. I prefer classification, if feasible:
the amalgamated list is itself informative, and indeed, reference to his
productions should appear in the author’s entry, as an aspect of his
working life and thought. Knight, though, chose a different course:
For those of [Churchill’s] works that are quoted or referred to in
the text the reader is cross-referenced to the entries under their
titles. (1966)
In what order to list amalgamated titles is a moot point. With an
author whose many works are well known I would choose to list them
85
alphabetically, as being titles familiar to the reader, who will probably

expect to find them in alphabetical sequence. For an author of few books,
though, not well known, each of which represents a career stage and
a period of their life – research, residence in the location of the book,
perhaps, the sustained business of the writing, publication, reviews and
repercussions – chronological sequence seems more appropriate. In
Richard Burton’s biography, film and play titles were career stages.
De Beer (1967) comments on this issue:
I suppose the only practical course for useful guidance is to
guess at what lies between the titles that ‘every schoolboy knows’
and those that will be required only by specialists who are
bound to know the authors.
It may prove necessary to give works their own individual entries,
cross-referred from the author’s entry, to allow an extra level of
subheadings for them. As well as being productions of the writer’s
intelligence and industry, books may have a literary history requiring
their own subheadings: progress of composition; publication; reviews
and repercussions; reprints; distribution of copies; dramatization. These
are the subheadings in Matthews’ Dickens index under the main one,
Christmas Carol, A:
boyhood reading in; CD reads; character of Tiny Tim in; and
Cornish tin mines; dismissed by Westminster Review; Fancy
in; on home; and money; origins; writing of; pirated; portrays
Bayham Street house; profits; publication; quality; reality of
characters in; religion in; success of
There are about three-quarters of a column of subheadings each under
Bleak House, David Copperfield, and Little Dorrit; and half a column
each under Martin Chuzzlewit, Mystery of Edwin Drood, Oliver Twist, Our
Mutual Friend, Pickwick Papers, and Tale of Two Cities, in the Dickens
book. The entries for Nabokov’s chief works in the index to Brian Boyd’s
biography are long and much subdivided (see pages 82–3).
To avoid long paragraphs of cross-referenced titles listed under
authors’ entries, Leigh Priest gives the dispersed titles in bold type, with
a see note at the bottom of the writer’s entry giving instruction to look for
86
The works
the works in bold throughout the index (Priest, personal communication,

1992). Then, the author’s books may be manifest in the biography also
as sources – quoted or disputed, contrasted with other accounts of the
events described. Books in books have many aspects.
The majority of the indexes cited on pages 69–72 have a subheading,
works or writings under the entry for the main character – sometimes very
long. As noted (page 69), in the volume Benjamin Britten: A Biography
there is a second, detailed, nearly 8-page ‘Index of Britten’s Works’. In
that, the entries for Billy Budd, Death in Venice and The Turn of the Screw
each run to half a column, and Peter Grimes to more.
The index to John Eliot Gardiner’s biography, Music in the castle of
heaven: a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach (Allen Lane, 2013) explains
in detail its policy regarding the indexing of his works in a prefatory
note:
Musical compositions named in the index are generally filed
under their composer. Those by J. S. Bach are arranged by genre
and name under the heading Bach, Johann Sebastian, works,
with the exception of the cantatas, the surviving Passions, and
the B Minor Mass, which all receive major treatment in the
book and have their own main heading in the index: ‘cantatas
of J. S. Bach’, ‘John Passion’, ‘Matthew Passion’ and ‘Mass in B
Minor by J. S. Bach’.
The index to this biography runs to 29 pages: the main heading
Bach, Johann Sebastian, man and musician is followed by two pages
of subheadings; Bach, Johann Sebastian, works by nearly two pages;
cantatas of J. S. Bach by four pages; ‘John Passion’, ‘Matthew Passion’ and
‘Mass in B Minor by J. S. Bach’ by one column each.
Christopher Phipps considered all the options for listing Dr Johnson’s
many works, and chose both to give (Phipps, 2012):
individual index entries for the works in their own right;
the entries on some titles themselves containing detailed
subheading breakdowns covering matters of the work’s origin,
production, publication, revision and content. […] With the
detailed coverage included elsewhere in the index, it would
therefore have been possible under the Johnson, Samuel: Works
87
subentry simply to have opted for see individual titles. This,

though, optimistically presupposes that readers and index users
will all be familiar with the titles covered in the text. It also
misses another opportunity for the index to add further value to
the editorial apparatus of the book. I therefore chose to provide
a much fuller see reference listing the works individually by title.
This also indicates the further index entries which bring together
other works by Johnson in particular genres, such as poetry,
political pamphlets, prayers, prefaces and introductions, reviews,
sermons and translations, plus his contributions to specific
named magazines; the cumulative whole thereby comprising a
handy mini-bibliography of all the Johnson works discussed in
the text.
Characters
Entries for characters in works of fiction may bring further problems.
Forenames only may be given; or they may be always known as ‘Little
Em’ly’, ‘Little Nell’; what form of name to give for these? And where?
Characters appearing in a single work may be listed under the title of that
work – Ophelia under Hamlet, Fagin under Oliver Twist – but recurrent
characters, such as Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet
Vane, may be best entered directly under their names. They should then
be typographically distinguished from real people; if italic type is used
to indicate illustrations, and bold for main entries, then quotation marks
could indicate the fictionality of
‘Bond, James’
‘Wooster, Bertram’
The index (by Christine Shuttleworth) to Victoria Glendinning’s
biography of Anthony Trollope (Hutchinson, 1992) in addition to a long
sub-entry, works , under his own name, had a separate entry under C,
characters in AT’s works , listing the many characters in his sequence of
novels referred to in the biography, in alphabetical order (at the request
of the biographer).
88
The works
Letters
Letters written by the characters in biographies or histories, similarly,
may be treated as indications of their developing relationships; examples
of their literary, perhaps published, products; valued relics; or as sources
for the narrative. The relevant sub-subheadings in two entries in my index
to Jane Austen read:
(under Austen, Jane)
letters:to Fanny Austen (niece); to James-Edward Austen-Leigh;
to Anne Sharp; see also under Austen, Cassandra (sister);
published; and other papers, posthumous disposal
Austen-Leigh, James-Edward (nephew of JA): letters to: JA’s, about
writing; JA’s last; father’s, in JA’s last illness
and in the index entry for Gerald Brenan in his biography:
letters[…]; publication considered; published; archived; see also
under recipients
Under the entry for Winston Churchill himself in Knight’s index, the
preliminary note tells us:
there are for several types of material cross-references only, e.g.:
churchill , Winston Leonard Spencer, letters from and to: see
under the names of recipients and senders. (Bancroft, 1968)
89
11. Just mentioning …
After all references worthy of the distinction and space of subheadings

have duly received them, there are likely to remain for major entries lists
of page references to minor mentions, too trivial for subheadings, but too
many together, or just significant enough, not to be omitted altogether.
This, of course, may result in the undifferentiated strings of page numbers
that many indexers and critics condemn. Judy Batchelor (1983) wrote
wittily about an index with subject headings ‘attended by massed ranks
of page-references’:
The total view, of handsome, unbroken blocks of greyish-
black print on a whitish ground, offers an almost hypnotic
design of severe restraint; it should prove ideal for library
wallpaper in times of recession [rather than] the utilitarianism
of ‘reader-accessibility’.
For biographies, there is the problem of a multitude of minor mentions.
Minor characters, relations or long-term friends or colleagues of the main
character, may appear recurrently in the book, merely mentioned as
constantly there in the background. The indexer must choose between
omitting them; giving them a false impression of significance by according
them subheadings; or letting them honestly appear as unqualified lists of
minor mentions – and thus fall open to censure by index judges. I have
myself been censured for compiling an index, to my own book, that was
deemed to have ‘too many undifferentiated locators’ – all these were,
indeed, mentions not significant enough to require subheadings, but too
many for the subject to be omitted, and the strings the result of careful
consideration by the author/indexer (Toole, 2007).
I find strings may well be justifiable, preferable to any of the
alternative means of dealing with minor references detailed below.
Omission, tout court, I would deplore. Someone who appears twelve
times through the book, as a minor, background figure on several
90
Just mentioning …
occasions, does merit inclusion in the index. The twelve references

together may achieve only the same scale of importance as one single
main entry; but the name should then appear in the index, as having
repeatedly appeared in the book. Perhaps even a single minor mention
merits inclusion – ‘If an author sees fit to name somebody who are we to
ignore that person?’ asks Ian Craine (2018).
Prefacing strings with the word mentioned, often advocated, seems
pompous and overloading to me – such a long word in this context as
to be paradoxically used! The use of passim similarly introduces an extra
word where one is trying to minimize space taken. A happier solution is
suggested in the prefatory note to Thornton’s index to Dickens’ letters:
The word ‘also’ preceding a series of page numbers indicates that
the references are minor and miscellaneous. (Thornton, 1965)
I was fascinated by Michael Brackney’s suggestion of printing gray
locators or superscript numerals to indicate minor mentions but – hardly
surprisingly – it never caught on (Bell, 2008a).
Applying arithmetical principles to reduce a string of eleven such
page numbers to an acceptable five by picking out some at random to
receive unmerited distinction and prominence by subheading them
could result in an unbalanced index, falsely suggesting to users that
important passages will be found by turning to those references.
There should be a true correspondence between the importance of
a character or passage in the text, and the space it occupies in the
index; subheadings should be accorded on the basis of the intrinsic
importance of the entry, never merely to distinguish one unimportant
reference from others purely for purposes of subtraction. Words, too,
take more space than page numbers, although their significance in an
index is actually less.
Another possible strategy for the avoidance of strings is the
temptation to streamline falsely by converting an honest 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
13, 14 to an apparently more acceptable 8–14. Neater, but less accurate.
Despite appearances, a mere SMITH 30–48 indicates a lengthier, more
sustained treatment of Smith in the text than does the more extensive
index entry, SMITH 30, 33–4, 37, 39, 40–2, 45, 47–8.
In a long entry with many subheadings, where the arrangement is
chronological, page references not deemed worthy of subheadings might
91
be tucked into brackets in correct chronological place between page

references with subheadings, thus:
leaves school 45–8; (52, 55, 58); meets Joyce 63–6; (69, 72, 78);
wedding 90–3; honeymoon 96–8; (100, 105, 109); moves
to Suffolk 115–16; (123, 129, 136); applies for teaching post
140; …
This has the advantage both of breaking up the string into shorter
snippets, and letting these convey some information by their placing in
sequence.
I would prefer to leave the lines of undifferentiated page numbers.
The obvious message of an index entry is, ‘information on this topic can
be found on this page’. A rider may be, ‘It has a subheading, taking up
the space of several page numbers, so it must be important – well worth
turning to’. A string of undifferentiated entries (in a conscientiously
compiled index, that is) should bear its own, honest message: ‘These
are all minor references to this person/topic, none of which is worth
emphasizing with a subheading’ – especially if there are indeed some
subheadings beneath the block of unadorned page numbers, indicating
the difference in significance. (In a non-conscientiously compiled index,
of course, such a block might show only that the indexer had been lazy,
or starved of space, or relied on a computer flagging terms to merge
references automatically and left it at that.)
We must recognize that a grade of references does exist between
deserving omission and a subheading, and it causes necessary strings.
There will be chronic cases of recurrent, trivial appearances: life’s like
that. There may even be virtue in a massive, undifferentiated block of
page numbers. Collocation of dispersed references is achieved; and in
one index, listing all references to the hero’s drinking bouts, I saw no
need to subdivide or more closely specify these – the simple agglom-
eration told its own startling tale, giving the answer not to, ‘where,
exactly?’ but to, ‘how much?’. Sub-strings – threads, perhaps – may occur
when one subheading exactly fits a whole sequence of references: human
lives may be repetitive businesses.
Strings of undifferentiated page references may indicate deliberate
value judgement on the part of the indexer. I have described (page 54)
92
Just mentioning …
a diary so rife with vituperative attack that I chose to give paragraphs

merely of page numbers for these, not dignifying or endorsing them with
summaries.
Literary language may present many slight references to a theme,
separated in the text, but the repetition itself constituting significance.
Echoing is a literary technique whereby a theme is never boldly stated,
but hinted at so frequently that the effect is cumulative. In the novel
Possession (Byatt, 1990), ‘[r]iddles and riddling’, and snakes and serpents,
are examples of this; lists could be compiled of the pages where they
appear – or are hinted at, implied – but it would be clumsily overdoing
it to clamp subheadings over the faint invocations. Strings of page
numbers, undifferentiated, are just what would be needed here.
Strings have long had their distinguished advocates. James Thornton
wrote of his index to Dickens’ letters, which was to win the Wheatley
Medal in 1969:
What was wanted was a break-down of the material under broad
heads. The index sins again and again against the rule that there
should not be more than four or five undifferentiated references.
To have introduced a great deal more descriptive matter simply
out of regard for this rule would often have given a significance
which was not born out by the text nor justified by anticipation
of the interests of future readers. It would also frequently have
meant that readers would find little more in the text than they
already knew from the index. To make reference to the text is
often for me an ideal of indexing, but to have followed this ideal
with Dickens would have made the index unbearably long and
confusing, with sub-classification carried to the fourth or fifth
degree. (1965)
John Shaftesley, reviewing R. F. Hunnisett’s Indexing for editors in
1972 proclaimed:
Dr Hunnisett is on the side of those many indexers who believe
it to be bad practice to have solid blocks of page numbers,
unbroken by modifications, following particular entries. At the
risk of a charge of philistinism, I do not wholeheartedly concur in
this. If it is a question merely of aesthetics (which are important,
93
of course, even in the layout of lists), then I believe aesthetics

are really not the criterion in the appearance of an index. If it
is a question of adequacy, one must remind indexers that very
often stern economics – not necessarily publishers’ parsimony
– may dictate the amount and cost of space to be devoted to
it. Nor can every person, place, or subject, however numerous
the page numbers their mention may demand, be supplied with
enough important subheadings to justify separate treatment,
yet the researcher needs every relevant page number that can be
discovered. An index can look beautiful typographically, but it
is essentially a working tool and one should not officiously strain
to turn it into a master work of art visually. As Dr Hunnisett
observes in another connection, an index entry is ‘not a potted
biography’, and page numbers, when all is said and done, are its
raison d’être.
In 2012 Christopher Phipps added his voice to the chorus, writing:
What is more problematic for the indexer [of a biographical
text] is the walk-on player who makes multiple appearances,
none of which is of notably significant importance. In other
types of indexing, such references may rightly be judged as
‘passing mentions’ and therefore omitted from the index. But
here [making an index entry for Dr Johnson’s near-contem-
porary Edmund Burke in a biography of Johnson] I think
such an approach would not be serving the index user well
[…] I therefore opted (say it quietly) to include a simple string
of locators […] I would argue, an undifferentiated string of
locators can be an eloquent indicator to the index user of the
importance of the character in the narrative and the extent of the
information they will find at any of the references.
Marian Aird, in 2016, pleaded the case for strings in indexes to volumes
of letters:
the inclusion of casual but regular references to an individual,
even when it is almost impossible to provide subheadings, is
essential if the index is to be comprehensive […] the long string
94
Just mentioning …
of page numbers is as much evidence of [Britten’s sister’s] strong

presence in his life as it is to any significant information about
her in the text.
That ties up the matter nicely, we think.
An article about strings in The Indexer is:
The Ah!-factor. Hazel K. Bell. 17(3), 191–2
95
12. Presentation and layout
Prefatory notes
Major, massive, even whole-volume indexes need their individual plan
and principles explained. Nearly forty entries concerning Pepys himself
are listed after the preface to the volume-index to the diary. Knight
(1970) observed of Thornton’s index to Dickens’ letters:
Jame’s Thorton’s zeal for perfection is exemplified by his devoting
a full page to the preliminary notes in which he explains: what
names are, and what are not, included; how the names of
title holders and married women will be found indexed, also
localities, buildings and streets; that books and writings are
entered mainly under the name of the author; and the meanings
of the abbreviations and symbols employed.
The single-volume biography of Canning has a prefatory note of
four paragraphs and a list: ‘The following are among the more important
abstract headings’. Forty are given, from acts of indian gov t. to white
mutiny (Macmillan, 1962).
Any abbreviations used in the index should be explained in a note
at the head (as, ‘RB in the index stands for Richard Burton; ET for
Elizabeth Taylor’), and any departure from normal practice, as perhaps
in the principle of indexing the peerage. It might also be stated if, for
instance, page references in italics refer to illustrations and bold to
major references, and whether the names of authors’ works are dispersed
through the index or gathered under their names. Readers of biographies,
who are likely to be private individuals rather than information science
bodies, may well be unaware that there are different systems of alphabeti-
zation, or standards for indexing, and I see no need to use space
96
Presentation and layout
informing them of these. They are not given to studying notes before
consulting indexes; more likely to plunge in and search around where
they think entries are likely to be found than to devise a search path after
consulting a long note.
Knight’s index to Churchill ‘begins with a note on its scope and
on the meaning of the abbreviations and conventions used in it. This is
a model of such a note, short but clear and exhaustive’, wrote Richard
Bancroft (Bancroft, 1968). The first two paragraphs of the prefatory note
to the index of Anthony Eden are quoted on pages 37 and 69; the third
adds, ‘The abbreviation “AE” is used for Anthony Eden and “E” for Eden’.
The whole note takes twelve lines, full across the page.
Run-on style
Chronological arrangement of subheadings with a narrative form seems
to me to entail setting run-on, to reinforce the narrative reading effect.
Indented style is best suited to alphabetical order, where the first letter
of subheadings should be conspicuous, and the keywords brought to the
front. Indented subheadings in narrative form are inappropriate, and give
a staccato, disjointed effect; narrative requires the continuity of sequence
of headings, which also allows retaining prepositions, whose use in
indented subheadings is often deprecated. Scanning entries for unknown
terms is easier when looking at dense blocks of print than following long,
thin columns extending over pages.
In Wittmann’s 1990 study of subheadings, ‘All eight indexes had
run-on subheadings, since a preliminary comparison of award-winning
indexes suggested that run-on subheadings and set-out subheadings have
characteristically different length and syntax’. Knight (1979) wrote that
run-on sets of subheadings extending to several columns:
not only produce a distasteful appearance but [are] wholly
inimical to any ease of reference. I therefore take any credit
that may be due for having devised the splitting up of any long
list of subheadings into paragraphs […] start a new paragraph
after about every sixth subheading. If possible, each paragraph
should open with a subheading of some significance. If the
subheadings are arranged alphabetically, it may be neat and
97
convenient to begin each letter of the alphabet with a new

paragraph.
This suggested paragraphing of Knight’s is for visual relief only, not the
meaningful division into headed paragraph sections used in the indexes
to Dickens, Eden and Pepys, for example. Knight’s entries are broken
into paragraphs with no change to the order of headings, the breaks
being unrelated to the meaning (‘a new paragraph after about every sixth
subheading’); and does not give the advantage of allowing another level
of sub-subheadings within the paragraphs by section heads.
Within the paragraphs, set run-on, narrative subheadings may be read
as chronological narrative, continuously. The ending of a subheading then
may not necessarily discontinue its significance. For instance ‘Marcus:
living with Stephanie 50–60; after Mrs Orton arrives 70–80’ in my
index to Byatt’s Still life does not have to imply that Marcus is no longer
living with Stephanie after Mrs Orton’s arrival. A subheading format to
make this logically clear would be inappropriate – even clumsy – for a
narrative index.
Sub-subheadings
Sub-subheadings are sometimes regarded as difficult to use in run-on
layout. There are several possible methods of achieving this.
(1) Breaking the entry into paragraphs with section headings
allows sub-subs of the main heading to become simple
subheadings within each paragraph, giving another layer to
play with.
(2) Subheading terms may also be repeated with each sub-sub,
to form each time a new, complete subheading, as, e.g.:
Brown, John: at school, friends; at school, prizes; at school,
uniform
(3) The use of brackets allows a third layer of heading, as in:
Abbey Theatre; […] SO’C’s relationship with, […], (deterio-
ration); The Plough and the Stars (submitted), (production),
(programme), (controversy following); tours, […]
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Indented style
Sometimes indented style is used in a chiefly run-on-set index for
particularly apposite selected paragraphs. In Matthews’s index to Dickens,
as described above, those paragraphs under the main heading that were
arranged alphabetically were set in this way, among others set run-on.
With alphabetical arrangement, the first word of each subheading needs
to be clearly distinguishable, as, under DICKENS, CHARLES:
char acteristics
abstemiousness
anger and temper
anxieties and fears
appearance and dress […]; see also beard, below, and
sub-heading Portraits
authoritarianism
beard and moustache
Ian Craine (2018) advocates a mixture of styles:
All biographies I’ve ever done demanded that the [main]
subject was indexed. But you […] need to find categories for
collections of entries. I’d enter the first tier of subheadings in
set-out – maybe a mix of chronological and alphabetical and
quite possibly in upper case. So something like early years:
education: first steps to fame: marriages: friends: publications:
opinions of others: others ’ opinions of etc. Then I’d do the
second tier in run-on.
Typographical devices
Knight writes in 1966 of his use of typographical differentiation:
In the Churchill index, I have pulled out nearly every stop
available to the indexer, including the open diapason of using
bold type for page references for items to which more than a few
lines are devoted in the text. Similarly I put page references in
italics to denote illustrations or maps. I also use bis and (more
99
occasionally) ter after a page reference to indicate that the

subject is referred to quite separately twice or thrice respectively
on the same page.
Two of the whole-volume biographical indexes considered here, those
to Boswell and Pepys, resort in their indexes to special typographical
conventions for differentiation. In 1967, de Beer wrote of Dr Powell’s
typographical usage (and of that of his predecessor in the indexing
of Boswell, George Birkbeck Hill, in the Clarendon Press, six-volume
edition of 1887):
Both use heavy type for important keywords; Dr Powell to
great advantage in entries such as those for Smollett and Virgil,
where sub-entries for quotations must be distinguished from the
rest. Where Dr Powell excels is in the typography of the longer
complex entries, and especially in some of those that are divided
into numerical sections:
To facilitate consultation of the very long articles on the
major characters, letters, corresponding to the initials of the
keywords of the entries, are inserted in their appropriate
places; these, and the important keywords themselves, are
printed in heavy type, e.g. BOSWELL: A account of himself;
B enters at the bar; C visits Cambridge; D buys Dalblair;
drinking: a lover of wine. […] Italics are used in headings
and subheadings for titles of books and plays, and for ships’
names; and for words discussed by Johnson. The last is
important.
This last usage also indicates how indexers may resort to special devices
in order to cope with the particular contents of each text for indexing,
rather than look to standard precepts to cover all contingencies.
Robert Latham evolved a whole complicated stratification to cope
with Samuel Pepys himself in the index to the diary. An article on the
design of indexes approved the result: ‘This example shows how complex
entries can be presented well for the reader’s use; a variety of distinction
of elements has been used’ (Ridehalgh, 1985).
100
Latham (1984) explains:

[Pepys] had to be dealt with for the most part under a series
of distinct headings – HEALTH, DIARY (P), CLERK OF THE
ACTS, BOOKS, MUSIC and so on.
The principal entries concerning Pepys are listed on the page

following the preface to the index volume. There are nearly forty of
these, including four under General: Pepys, Samuel, recollections of early
life; Correspondence; Diary (P); Writings; 12 under Career, nine under
Private Life, and 13 under Interests and tastes.
Bernard Levin (1983) described this index as:
a huge compilation; 600 columns […] not merely exhaustive but
exhaustively detailed. I have tried every kind of trick question I
could think of on this astonishing guide to the Diary, and have
not been able to catch it out in a single lacuna.
He gives details of the ‘very substantial’ entry for HEALTH :
The entry is divided into ‘Health (illness/disease/condition)’
and ‘Health (remedies/treatment)’. The first of these is divided
into 51 sub-sections headed in small capitals (‘abscess, ague,
allergy, apoplex y, […] toothache, ulcer , vomiting’) and each of
these contains up to 30 topical headings; the second is split still
further, remedies and treatment being divided into ‘medicinal’
(‘balsam, cordial, diuretic …’), ‘surgical’ (‘amputations, cautery,
dentistry …’), ‘dressings ’, ‘diet ’, and ‘other treatments ’, each
of these sub-subheadings being in turn further broken down
topically.
To illustrate the use of varying typefaces, indentations, and new
lines for major subheadings in this index, we quote part of an entry just
as it is set out in the original volume, with facsimile line breaks. Note
that full capitals are used for main headings, with turnovers indented
one character; small caps for subheadings, not indented; small caps also
for sub-subs, indented two characters, with text then run-on, turnovers
indented only one character.
101
DRESS AND PERSONAL APPEAR-

ANCE (MEN AND BOYS) {see also
Prices; Watches etc.}:
gener al (P): importance of good
linen, 3/216, 228; 8/121; and neatness,
2/199 & n. 1; to dress fashionably,
4/343, 357; 5/269, 302; 6/100;
concerned at expense, 2/47, 129;
4/356, 357; 6/104; concerned not to
overdress, 9/551
garments and accessories:
aprons: worn by apprentice
weavers, 5/222
bands: King’s lack of, 8/417; (P):
1/85, … 7/61; lace/fine bands, 3/215, …
in plain band mistaken for servant,
8/115; band strings, 2/80
belts (P): sword belt, 4/80;
7/26, […] 537
boots (P): ridingboots, 1/279;
2/132; …
breeches: two legs through one
knee of, 2/66 & n.2; (P): baize
linings, 1/268; closeknee’d, 3/106;
white linings, 4/130; rabbit skin
prevents galling, 5/298; silk, 6/218;
camlet, 9/533
Typographical distinction fails in the index to Spalding’s Vanessa
Bell. The paragraph headings for the main character’s entry are each set
at the beginning of a line, but in italics, similarly to the titles of works
of art and literature. They are thus visually indistinguishable from titles,
and those titles (or parts of titles) that appear at the beginnings of lines
could be taken as subheads. Some such strange simulated subheads in
this index entry appear to be: RMS Queen Mary; Fry; Poppies; Nursery
Tea; Kitchen.
102
However, for most of us, engaged in the day-to-day indexing of

biographies of c.300 pages, just a few of these conventions are likely to
prove sufficient: bold type for major references among a sequence of
minor ones; small capitals for paragraph headings; italics for book and
journal titles, and for the equivalent of stage directions – those terms
not actually part of the index but outside, administering it: see, see also
titles of books.
Piggott gives warning against overdoing it, citing Recherches sur
les Confessions de Saint Augustin by Pierre Courcelle (Boccard, 1950)
(Piggott, 1991):
Typography does all the work of subheadings in the general
index. Bold type is used for names of persons closely connected
with Augustine until his 35th year; small capitals for names of
other persons in antiquity; italics for words and expressions with
historical, doctrinal or philological interest; and ordinary roman
for the rest. So one finds:
Ambroise de Milan [and his page reference in bold]
annibal [in small capitals]
Carthage [in roman]
démons [in italic]
figuier symbolique [in italic]
Harris [a modern writer quoted, in roman]
It is ingenious, repulsive to look at, and, surely, not very helpful.
Michael Brackney had some most intriguing ideas for typographical
distinctions of index items. For instance, when general descriptions
and mere mentions are referenced together directly after the main
headings, to make clear which are which, he suggests indexing
general discussions with locators underlined, ‘which would serve as
an unobtrusive indication of importance similar to the indication of
importance supplied by a subheading’; and indexing passing mentions
with locators formatted in gray (the opposite of bold type for major
references) – or in superscript numerals. He suggests combining two
same-page locators such as 61, 61 (or 61, 61), that indicate text and
illustration occurring on the same page, into a single locator, as in 61*
or 61* (or even 61≡, using an icon to represent lines of text), and as in
103
61+ph. As to passim … he considered using a tilde or ellipsis points as

a page range concatenator, turning a conventional page range into the
typographic equivalent of passim. But, ‘although [he] liked the discrete
spaciousness of the ellipsis points, [he] found their implication of
“something left out” to be too antithetical to the meaning of passim.’
Instead he advocates three hyphens, as in 44---50, or three raised dots,
as in 44…50, ‘as a symbolic equivalent of passim – a veritable graphic
representation of discrete passages that is compact in proportional
fonts’ (Bell, 2008a).
In 2011 Brackney won the Wilson Award for Excellence in Indexing
for his index to Dogen’s Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku
– a translation of a collection of works by a Sōtō Zen monk – published
by Wisdom Publications. In this index Brackney used some of his own
typographical distinctions, explained in the headnote thus:
– Bold page numbers indicate either primary references to
persons or actual pages of Dogen’s text.
– Page numbers followed by (2) indicate two separate
discussions.
– Page numbers followed by q indicate quotations.
– Page numbers followed by n plus a number, as in 75n1,
indicate footnotes.
– Page numbers followed by +n plus a number, as in 75+n2,
indicate discussions plus footnotes.
– Page numbers followed by t indicate tables.
A splendid array indeed! And an ideal for indexers to aspire to?
Articles on the design and layout of indexes that have appeared in

The Indexer are:
The typography of indexes. S. I. Wicklen. 1(1), 36–41
The typography of indexes. Robin Kinross. 10(4), 179–85
Printer and indexer. Hugh Williamson. 12(2), 65–72
104
The design of indexes. Nan Ridehalgh. 14(3), 165–74

How the publishers want it to look. Jean Simpkins. 17(1), 41–2
The visual appeal of indexes: an exploration. Frances S. Lennie. 28(2),
60–7
The Chicago manual of style on indexes: how it has changed. Sylvia
Coates. 36(2), 68–70
105
13. The user
Who are the users of our indexes? Ian Craine (2018) claims:
I believe an index is for future readers, not publishers, not
authors, not the Society of Indexers training manuals, not
Quality Standards.
There are various particular groups of likely readers of biographies
and users of their indexes, with varying specific requirements.
Genealogists and researchers of family histories search eagerly for the
smallest reference to a name, trivial though the mention may be in the
book. A historian speaking at a conference of the Society of Indexers
begged us to include in our indexes the names of all people mentioned,
down to the most minor references to servants in the background, to help
researchers such as herself (Bell, 1996).
Another group of users – reviewers – are reputed sometimes to look
only at the index of a book, hoping to find there sufficient summary of
the text and indication of its chief topics to spare them the reading. As
mentioned earlier (page 7), this is blandly acknowledged by Whittemore
(1999), who writes: ‘For an ordinary newspaper reviewer, for instance
[…] a biography should have a good index to help him skip perhaps half
a thousand pages.’
Students, too, may see indexes as short-cuts to knowledge. Anita
Heiss confessed that she ‘managed to get through some subjects in [her]
undergraduate degree by only reading indexes of books’ (Heiss, 2015).
Paul Gifford, reviewing Michel Jarrety’s Paul Valèry, referred to the
‘serviceable index (helpful to the far greater number who will consult it
as a reference book)’ (Gifford, 2009).
106
The user
Is that me …?
‘Most biographies are about dead people,’ Alain de Botton observes
(1995). But the readership of current biographies and autobiographies
may well include living characters featured in the text, and therefore also
in the index – indexees, we may call them. Some may yearn to appear
there: one confessed, ‘Shamefully I admit to having bought one or two
books simply on the strength of having seen my name in the index […]
It seems some men count their index mentions as others count sexual
conquests’ (Roy, 1993). Michael Lister, reviewing Frederic Raphael’s
autobiography, Cuts and bruises (Carcanet, 2006), accuses the author,
assumed also to be the book’s indexer, of:
provid[ing] a name index […] to satisfy those, about whom the
author has written elsewhere,‘who look first in the index of their
contemporaries’ books to see if they are cited. It is better to be
abused than ignored’. (Lister, 2006)
Andy McSmith attributed the same considerate motive to Tam Dalyell,
in reviewing his memoir, The importance of being awkward (Birlinn, 2011).
He wrote:
He has an absurdly polite habit of name-checking everyone he
has known whom he thinks deserves to be remembered. By my
approximate count, over 600 of his contemporaries are listed in
the index. (McSmith, 2011)
The most sensitive of potential indexees are likely to be politicians.
The‘Washington read’, defined as: ‘the perusal of a book by checking the
index for references, usually to oneself, and reading only those parts of
the book’ (Lee, 2004) was described in Chapter 1, relating to political
memoirs. Campbell (2008) wrote:
The only thing worse for a politician than a morning newspaper
without his name in it is a political book without his name in it
[…]. Books hang around, and if you’re not mentioned they just
sit there as constant reminders of your insignificance. When a
new political book comes out, MPs hit the bookstores – always
at odd hours, to avoid detection – and discreetly examine the
107
index to see if they are mentioned. If not, the book is banned

from the MP’s office. If you are mentioned, you buy multiple
copies for friends and family. (Note to publishers: to increase
sales, pack your indexes with as many politicos as possible.)
Assuredly, however trivial the reference in the text, such characters
would wish to be included in the index.
Indexees may even be appointed reviewers of the books in which
they appear. Thus, Victoria Glendinning, reviewing Martha Gellhorn: a
life by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto, 2003), frankly declared, ‘I am not
without bias. I know the author of this biography. My name is in the
index. This is the kind of thing that gives book reviewing a bad name’
(Glendinning, 2003). While Germaine Greer, on receipt of a review copy,
stormed: ‘There’s no way I could avoid being sent a complimentary copy
of Tony Moore’s Dancing with empty pockets: Australia’s bohemians. I have
no intention whatever of reading it, if only because my name is a bulky
entry in the index’ (Greer, 2012).
Articles on the user that have appeared in The Indexer are:

Indexes for local and family history: a user’s view. John Chandler.
13(4), 223–7
User approaches to indexes [family history]. Jean Stirk. 16(2), 75–8
Whom should we aim to please? Hazel K. Bell. 20(1), 3–5
Information access or information anxiety? An exploratory evaluation of
book index features. Elizabeth D. Liddy and Corinne L. Jörgensen.
20(2), 64–8
Let’s get usable! Usability studies for indexes. Susan C. Olason. 22(2),
91–5
Who are we indexing for exactly? Michèle Clarke. 26(1), 35
108
14. Fiction
Indexers are unlikely to be commissioned to index works of fiction, other

than (and that rarely) cumulative indexes to sets of works. However, the
indexing of fiction – which certainly consists of soft, narrative texts – is
an interesting topic deserving of consideration here.
Should fiction be indexed?

Although by no means standard practice, the indexing of fiction has been
undertaken from time to time. Serious novels may be indexed in the same
way as biographies or histories, as narratives concerning groups of people
and the events in their lives. Indexes to fiction may be needed more now
that chapter synopses no longer appear in contents lists.
Some of the authors consulted by Philip Bradley in a survey of views
as to the need for indexes to fiction objected to the idea of fiction being
indexed, holding that it might destroy the magic, ‘positively detrimental
to the aims of fiction as an imaginative, creative genre’ (Bradley, 1989).
Indexers too have expressed reservations. Douglas Matthews opposes the
indexing of fiction:
This kind of analysis of creative writing (whether fiction,
poetry or drama), which is form, rather than of, say, biography
which is documentation, presumes a reality which is not there.
Conventionally, an index is concerned with facts. The index
you construct is itself a fiction. […] Teasing out entries from
the text is damaging rather than enhancing, like pulling out
the threads from a patterned carpet to see what makes the
design. (personal communication, 1990)
109
David Wilson considers:

Perhaps the hankering for indexes to novels (insofar as it exists
at all) is sheer laziness. If we feel we need an index to Proust,
or Dickens, say, this is only because we haven’t been reading
with sufficient concentration. Dickens did give a helping hand
to his readers, in the early novels at least. It’s easier to find a
particular passage in Pickwick than in Our mutual friend, and the
chapter-rubrics of Fielding and Smollett are as entertaining as
most modern novels, and far fuller of incident. The only novel I
hold genuinely unnavigable without an index is Finnegans wake.
(personal communication, 1988)
But if indexes are to be held suitable adjuncts to any texts, to
allow the location of specific passages and collate dispersed references
to the same theme, then surely fiction that is serious, lengthy, and
complex is at least as deserving of these aids to study and research as
any other form of writing. Serious fiction combines elements of direct
conveying of information, as employed in histories, in its plots and
their developments, with literary style which deploys language with
subtlety, imagination, association, implication, and individual response
– the unindexable elements. Indexing could spare the symbolism, the
metaphors and the magic, restricting its work to names, places and
recorded events.
Andrew Ellis positively craved such indexes, writing in 1992:
How often I have wished that certain categories of fiction, to
which I return frequently, were indexed – for instance, certain
oeuvres such as the novels of L. P. Hartley – and novel ‘series’ or
‘sequences’ like the Barsetshire novels of Angela Thirkell.
Anthony Raven argued on this issue:
The facts in a work of fiction may have no independent existence
outside it, whereas those in a work of non-fiction do exist
independently of the book, but that is irrelevant. Within the
context of the book, which is all an index is concerned with, the
one kind of fact is every bit as factual, and as indexable, as the
110
Fiction
other. […] within the context of a book, i.e. within the purview
of its index, all facts are equally factual, regardless of whether
they also enjoy a different kind of factuality beyond the book’s
covers. […] book indexes index books, not real life. (Raven,
1990)
F. W. Lancaster considers the indexing and abstracting of fiction,
suggesting that ‘[t]he indexing of imaginative works is likely to be more
subjective and interpretative than other types’, and complicated further
by their essentially open-ended scope. ‘Since the context of imaginative
works is not restricted by subject matter, subject expertise, in the conven-
tional sense, is irrelevant to the situation.’ He concludes, ‘It is likely that
imaginative works present greater difficulties for the indexer than other
types of publication’ (Lancaster, 1991).
Simon Stern gives detailed examination of sixteenth–seventeenth
century indexes to literature – novels and poetry (Stern, 2009). He writes
that at first they served merely as memory prompts, plot summaries,
but came to ‘provide information of a different order’, such as moral
reflections; and later also to ‘pique the reader’s curiosity’, adding value to
the book as an enticement. Some more detailed indexes with long entries
guided readers to the treatment of some issue on which the book might
provide a useful maxim. Stern finds that indexes of that period often
took an ‘oddly jumbled form – mixing plot summaries, apothegms, and
cryptic summaries of their moral assessments’.
The indexer as literary critic

The indexing of fiction to some extent occurs in the valid indexing
of literary criticism. Take for example these entries from the index to
Charles Dickens’ Great expectations in the series of Icon Critical Guides
(Tredell, 1998):
Estella: and Biddy; characterisation; cruelty; and Miss Havisham;
Magwitch as father; murderess for mother; and Pip
food: Magwitch in churchyard; Magwitch in London; Pip at Satis
House
hands: Estella’s; Jaggers’s; Pip-Magwitch; ritual
111
Havisham, Miss: and Compeyson; as death; desire; eccentricity;

and Estella; hanging hallucination; madness; mothering; and
Pip; traits
As observed regarding reading the text (page 29), Tom Murphy explored
‘the possibilities of indexing as a teaching tool’ for studying literature, as
such indexing ‘required a special kind of close reading – one that could
not rest on merely superficial understandings but demanded a recursive
flow, the constant back and forth of careful reading and re-reading’
(Murphy, 2003).
Robert Irwin’s satirical article, ‘Your novel needs indexing’ (Irwin,
2000), was reviewed in the TLS as:
a study in tongue-in-cheek academicism, purporting to examine
the indexing of novels as ‘a transgressive act […] something that
can provide the work of fiction with an additional metatextual
level’. Irwin provides examples of how an index can warn that
a book is not worth reading, give you a fast forward on one
character’s love life, or indicate the lunacy of the author.
Indeed, he observes ‘what a useful critical tool a carefully-
assembled index can be’. (Halliburton, 2000)
Robert Collison (1962) too felt that he had turned literary critic in
indexing the novels of Robert Smith Surtees, writing:
The indexer, as no-one else, sees the author at his desk and waits
with eagerness to see whether he will take this opportunity or
avoid that trap. Often there is the temptation to cry out ‘what a
chance to develop the plot was missed here’, and often there is
a regret that some insignificant character was left unexploited
and featureless. Even the literary critic does not achieve the
remorseless degree of criticism to which the indexer is impelled
by the very nature of his work […]. Once the first shock of seeing
the inner workings is over, a new and deeper interest develops
which leads to a far readier appreciation of an author’s work.
Douglas Matthews wrote in 2004 of Pickering and Chatto’s project
‘to republish a large part of the Defoe canon […] 44 volumes, grouped
under five thematic headings: […] [the last being] The Novels (10)’. He
112
Fiction
was commissioned to index ‘Defoe’s works as they appeared’ (Matthews,

2004). However, when Volume 10 of THE NOVELS OF DANIEL
DEFOE was published in 2009, it was headed:
CONSOLIDATED INDEX
This index covers the introductions and explanatory notes only.
– a great disappointment to some.
The index, compiled by the author, to Philip Hensher’s novel The
fit (Fourth Estate, 2004), extends and illustrates the theme of the text.
The protagonist and narrator of the book is himself an indexer. John
Sutherland (2006) points out:
the rape and murder of his sister, Frankie, 17 years earlier […] is
that event from which John’s life has become a neurotic, never-
ending, tormented flight. ‘Frankie’, significantly, has no entry in
the index. Indexing is a means of rendering her invisible.
In a chapter on narratives in Writing lives: principia biographica, Leon
Edel treats Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando at length as a unique case to study
the relationship of fiction to biography, calling it ‘a fantasy in the form of
a biography’ (Edel, 1984):
In keeping with its nature the volume is endowed with an index.
The pretence of scholarship and exactitude is maintained to the
end. Yet it is a rather mischievous index, for it supplies data not
in the text […]. Such then are the conventional trappings which
dress out this fantasy-biography.
Gustave Flaubert claimed that his only true biography took the form
of his novel, Madame Bovary (Holmes, 1997).
The question is often argued of whether typographical distinction
should be made between ‘real’ characters in fiction (i.e. those with
historical life in the real world) and those of the authors’ imagination.
I would suggest not; although, for example, the Duke and Duchess of
Windsor undoubtedly have historical reality, their actions as depicted in
William Boyd’s novel Any human heart (Hamish Hamilton, 2002) are
fictitious, and should not be accorded apparent historical authentication
by use of a specified ‘reality-indicating’ typeface.
113
Indexes to fiction could be particularly valuable for sequences of

novels, such as Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga or A. N. Wilson’s The Lampert
Papers, or for those of authors who replay the same characters in separate
novels – such as Alison Lurie, with her frequently recurring members
of the ramifying Stockwell and Zimmern families, so fascinating to
recognize on unsignalled reappearance in a new context.
Indexing the fiction of A. S. Byatt

Bradley, indexing Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, found the problems
of indexing fiction to arise chiefly from lack of standardization of page
numbers, chapter numbering, spelling and nomenclature in different
editions of the same works (Bradley, 1989). In indexing five novels by
A. S. Byatt (Byatt, 1978, 1986, 1990) I found more abstract coils of
difficulty in indexing fictional rather than historic lives (Bell, 1991).
Fictional works contain much more than mere information, the
usual quarry of indexers. The text of novels is more complex than that
of biography because of the amount going on in each scene; as well as
basic plot development (corresponding to the development of the career
of the main character in a biography), there were in the Byatt novels
always developing relationships, images, symbols, themes, with their
significance to be interpreted and a suitable means of recording them
devised. It was often difficult to devise a single subheading to cover even
one paragraph for one character in the Byatt novels: to select one aspect
as the term of the subheading might be to dismiss several other possible
ones.
Indexers are supposed to select only ‘significant’ items from the
text for listing in the index. How to determine significance, in such rich,
detailed, widely allusive writing, is perplexing indeed. The subtlety and
complexity of the literary form make it particularly difficult to devise
headings that fully convey ‘aspect’ – what is said – rather than mere
‘aboutness’ – what is referred to – as differentiated by Weinberg (1988).
The significance of the text may simply overload the index term, not to
be conveyed in the index. Byatt’s themes were abstract and complex, and
quite differently treated among different characters and scenes of the
novels. How far to index symbols and metaphors became a most delicate
question.
114
Fiction
Characters in fiction are presented and interpreted in various

ways and at many levels. Biographers and historians rarely give long
thought sequences, or detailed dreams, of their subjects, but these
occur often in fiction; historians know less of their characters, and tell
us less, than the authors of fiction, who, creating their own characters
and so possessing total knowledge of them, can fully present both
their inner and outer lives. Fiction may present its events also as
recounted in characters’ conversations. Should one enter for a person
only references to their actual appearances and actions in the novel,
or also treat as valid references mentions of them in the conver-
sations, dreams or thoughts of others? So much that happens in the
Byatt novels is implicit only, or comprehensible only in the light of
later developments, that for some entries bald assumptions must be
made. Literary language has been called ‘a language of evocation, not
of reference’ (Cioffi, 1998). The structure of the whole, and the unity
of each chapter of these novels, have been deliberately engineered by
a literary writer in a way that the factual recording of historic events
does not need to be.
Problems of the devising and arrangement of subheadings for
the several major characters in fiction are more complex than those
encountered in biographies. The narrative is not always simply chrono-
logical. Flashbacks are a frequent form; memories and thoughts of
characters play a large part. Two periods may be simultaneously
presented: the time when someone is engaged in reflection, and the time
they are remembering.
For my index to Byatt’s novel, Still life, I needed subheadings I had
never used before – ‘conception’ as the first chronological entry for two
of the children, clearly designated. Babies were important in the stories,
needing new subheadings for babyhood. All human life was here indeed.
Novels published with indexes

Fiction and indexes, the pamphlet published by the Society of Indexers
(2nd edition, 2002) includes an annotated list of novels by 37 different
authors published with indexes (I have been able to name only two of
the indexers). Not all of them, by any means, are properly serious, full
indexes, however.
115
Some of those indexes are limited to listing names only:

e.g. Emma and Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen, in editions by
R. W. Chapman (Oxford University Press, 1923); Olivia Goldsmith,
Bestseller (HarperCollins, 1996); Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (Cape, 1979).
The index to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion (Allen & Unwin, 1977) is
to names only, but provided with full glosses. Others list only other
particular types of item: ‘Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims,
Cautions and Reflexions’ in Samuel Richardson’s own index to his
novels, Clarissa (3rd ed., 1751) and Sir Charles Grandison (1754); only
philosophers and philosophical concepts in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s
world: a novel about the history of philosophy (Phoenix House, 1995);
only mythological characters in John Updike’s The centaur (Deutsch,
1963). Wilton Barnhardt’s Gospel (St Martin’s Press, 1993) is fiction,
but includes historical personages and events; only these ‘purely factual
matters’ are indexed.
Larger works – sequences of novels – may have a series of indexes
of separate categories. Honoré de Balzac’s La comédie humaine (Garnier-
Flammarion, 1976–81) has an index of 775 pages in four parts: Index des
personnages fictifs; Index des personnes réelles et des personnages historiques
ou de la mythologie; Index des citées par Balzac; Index des oeuvres des
personnages fictifs. Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (Pleiade
edition, 1954) has an index of 151 pages in two parts: Index des noms
de personnes and Index alphabétique des noms de lieux, de contrées et
d’habitants. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the rings (HarperCollins, 2001)
has a 24-page index, divided into four sections: Songs and verses;
Persons, beasts and monsters; Places; Things.
Some novelists provide their own indexes purely for comedy,
such as Lucy Ellmann, Sweet desserts (Virago, 1988); A. P. Herbert,
Bardot, M.P.? and other modern misleading cases, (Methuen, 1964),
Misleading cases in the common law (1929), More misleading cases (1930),
and Uncommon law (1935); and Lemony Snicket, Lemony Snicket: the
unauthorized autobiography (HarperCollins). Lewis Carroll provided
‘an index whose whimsicality perfectly fitted the equally whimsical text’
(Wellisch, 1992) to the first edition of Sylvie and Bruno (Macmillan
1889), and a combined index to both novels with Sylvie and Bruno
concluded in 1893. Sadly, when the Sylvie and Bruno books have been
reprinted in those one-volume tomes purporting to be ‘The complete
116
Fiction
works of Lewis Carroll’, the indexes to Sylvie and Bruno are regularly
omitted (Imholtz, 1996).
Some authors add indexes to fictitious biographies to lend an
air of authenticity: Ranulph Fiennes, in The feather men and The sett
(Little Brown); Daniel Defoe, Memoirs of a cavalier (Oxford edition,
1972); George Gissing, The private papers of Henry Ryecroft (Archibald
Constable, 1903; Bell, 2006a); and Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Hogarth
Press, 1928: a basic, simple index: little over two pages to 215 pages of
text). Fiennes’ two books are described by the publishers as ‘factional
novels’: the original, hardback editions ask ‘Fact or fiction?’ on the covers.
William Boyd’s Any human heart, for example, is a fictional diary,
1923–91, purportedly kept by Logan Mountstuart, 490 pages, with
footnotes, to which Boyd himself provided an 11-page index. Asked on
the BookBrowse website why, he replied:
The search for authenticity and plausibility: to encourage the
reader’s suspension of disbelief. To encounter an index at the end
of a novel is extremely rare and somehow questions the novel’s
fictionality for a second or two. It was great fun to compile as
well, you have in the index Logan’s life in microcosm and it can
almost be read independently: you’d get a sense of who Logan
Mountstuart was and what his life contained.
Some of the indexes listed in the Society of Indexers’ pamphlet seem
quite surrealistic: Malcolm Bradbury, My strange quest for Mensonge
(Deutsch, 1987); Mark Z. Danielewski, House of leaves (Anchor, 2000);
Harry Mathews, The sinking of the Odradek Stadium (Carcanet, 1971–2);
Milorad Pavic, Landscape painted with tea (Knopf, 1990); Georges Perec,
Life: a user’s manual: fictions (trans. David Bellos; Collins Harvill, 1988).
In fact, the only proper subject indexes to fiction listed in that
brochure seem to be those to: Clive James, Brilliant creatures (Cape,
1983 – index by Ann Kingdom); Jerome K. Jerome, Three men in a boat
(annotated edition; Pavilion Books / Michael Joseph, 1982 – index
by Anthony Raven); and George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four (OUP,
Clarendon Press, 1984).
Many of these indexes to fiction, and others, were further considered
in ‘Fiction published with indexes in chronological order of publication’
(Bell, 2007).
117
Since then, indexes have been included to add apparent veracity to

fictional memoirs, as well as for comedy, in Alan Partridge: nomad by Steve
Coogan et al. (Trape, 2016); I, Partridge: we need to talk about Alan by
Steve Coogan et al. (HarperCollins, 2011); and Toast on Toast: cautionary
tales and candid advice by M. Berry and A. Mathews (Canongate, 2015).
Among other more serious examples of fiction seeking to appear
authentic by the provision of indexes are: Robert Sobel’s For want of
a nail: if Burgoyne had won at Saratoga (Greenhill Books, 1977), an
‘alternative history’ about the American Revolutionary War, provided
with an authenticating 14-page index; A strangeness in my mind by Orhan
Pamuk (Faber, 2015), a fictional family story set in Istanbul over 40+
years, its purported authenticity provided with a genealogical chart,
chronology, and index; and Alain de Botton’s Kiss and tell (Macmillan,
1995), a pseudobiography (246 pages) with a pseudobiographical,
properly detailed and structured index (12 pages) complete with full
breakdown into subheadings (provided also with ‘family trees’ and
photographs).
The 1906 edition from Hutchinson & Co. of The life and opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (640 pp) includes
a nine-and-a-half page ‘Index of Persons and Words’ – highly, and
illogically, selective (Phipps, 2006).
Other strange, partial indexes: Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (Panther,
1982) includes in the margins of the epilogue ‘An index of diffuse and
imbedded plagiarisms’.
Invisible power: a philosophical adventure story by Philip Allot (Xlibris
Corporation, 2005), after its 89-page narrative includes a page giving
‘Instructions for the use of this book’ which concludes ‘Thereafter the
reader may wish to read the Index where the contents of the book are
presented in molecular form’, and a 23-page single-column index with
its own heading, ‘Genome of a Human Reality: INDEX EXPLAINED:
Using the generic genetic mental elements (GGME’s) listed below, in
different proportions and different arrangements, it would be possible
to construct any number of alternative human realities (AHR’s)’ (Bell,
2006).
Fictitious works first published index-less to which indexes are later
supplied (sometimes more than once) include, as well as those listed
above: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s progress, The life and death of Mr. Badman
118
Fiction
and The holy war; Henry Fielding’s Amelia and Tom Jones; and Walter
Scott’s Waverley novels.
Articles about indexing fiction, and examples of such indexes, are
also to be found on the Internet, particularly on Tom Murphy’s website:
www.brtom.org/ind.html. His indexes to Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby,
Tim O’Brien’s The things they carried and John Gardner’s Grendel are
all accessible online, as are Suzanne Morine’s index to Salinger’s The
catcher in the rye, Lisa Mirabile’s to The English patient by Michael
Ondaatje and my own to A. S. Byatt’s The virgin in the garden and Still
life (combined), Babel tower and A whistling woman (combined) and
Possession; and cumulative indexes to the novels of J. L. Carr, Molly
Keane, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym and Angela Thirkell.
Articles on the indexing of fiction that have appeared in The Indexer

are:
A long fiction index [to Scott’s Waverley novels]. Philip Bradley. 8(3),
153–63
Para-index and anti-index (Sweet Desserts). Judy Batchelor. 16(3), 194
Indexes to works of fiction: the views of producers and users on the
need for them. Philip Bradley. 16(4), 239–46
Indexes to works of fiction (letter). Anthony Raven. 17(1), 60–1
Indexing fiction: a story of complexity. Hazel K. Bell. 17(3), 51–6
Should fiction be indexed? The indexability of text. Hazel K. Bell. 18(2),
83–6
A Marshland index – or ‘Indexing for the Hell of it’ (on his compilation
of indexes to the fiction of S. L. Bensusan). John Vickers. 19(4),
276–9
Indexer nascitur, non fit – Lewis Carroll as indexer again. August
A. Imholtz, Jr. 20(1), 11–13
Indexes as fiction and fiction as paper-chase [ War fever and Pale fire].
Hazel K. Bell. 20(4), 209–11
Thirty-nine to one: indexing the novels of Angela Thirkell. Hazel K. Bell.
21(1), 6–10
Kiss and tell and index. Hazel K. Bell. 21(4), 180–1
Exploring fiction and poetry through indexing. Tom Murphy. 23(4),
216–17
119
Sterne stuff. Christopher Phipps. 25(2), 112–13

Review, The private papers of Henry Ryecroft. Hazel K. Bell. 25(2),
149–50
Review, Invisible power. Hazel K. Bell. 25(2), 150–1
Fiction published with indexes: in chronological order of publication.
Hazel K. Bell. 25(3), 169–75
Fictional characters in non-fiction works. Madeleine Davis. 29(2), 65–9
‘As if we were reading a good novel’: fiction and the index from
Richardson to Ballard. Dennis Duncan. 32(1), 2–11
Back of the book, back of the net: the comedy books indexes of
Partridge and Toast. Paula Clarke Bain. 35(1), 18–24
See also: ‘Your novel needs indexing’. Robert Irwin, in New writing 9
ed. A. L. Kennedy & John Fowles, Vintage 2000.
120
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127
Index
abbreviations 63, 96, 97 aspect (comment) 58, 114

arrangement 60 articles on, listed 50
Abel, Richard 1–2, 6 Asquith, Lady Cynthia, diaries 11
aboutness (topic) 58, 114 assigned-term indexing 45
articles on, listed 50 attitudes, expressing 51–4
acknowledgements Augustine, St., biography 103
indexing 33 Austen, Jane
see also credit / acknowledgement biography 27, 69
to indexers letters in 89
aesthetics 93–4 novels 116
Aird, Marian 94–5 authors
Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord, war acknowledgements 33
diaries 26 autobiographers 8
Allot, Philip comment on index 23
Invisible power 118 consulting 38, 56, 109
alphabetical arrangement 39, 41 as indexers 8, 20, 63
of subheadings 60, 63, 66–7, indexers’ view of 30, 32, 112
78 indexes by
setting 97, 99 fictitious 113, 117
alphabetization system 60, 96 histories 4, 19–20, 51
articles on, listed 67 memoirs 52, 53
American Society of Indexers see works, indexing see works
H. W. Wilson Company ... see also bias
Award autobiography indexes 8–12
analysis, textual 31–2 award winners 22–3
and 49 bragging 52
Anderson, Margaret D. 76 scathing 53
Anderson, Marilyn 15, 48 self-indexing 8
annotation 13, 31–2 articles on indexing, listed 10
ANZI Medal 22–3 see also names of authors; diaries;
Arnold, Matthew, letters 15, 48 political memoirs
129
award-winning indexes Boyd, William

subheadings, study of 24, 44, 46, Any human heart 113, 117
97–8 brackets 91–2, 98
see also ANZI Medal; H. W. Wilson Brackney, Michael 91, 103–4
Company ... Award; ISC/SCI ... Bradley, Philip 109, 114
Award; Wheatley Medal Brenan, Gerald, biography 69, 89
Briggs, Julia 68
Bach, Johann Sebastian, biography 87 Britten, Benjamin
Balzac, Honoré de biography 69
La comédie humaine 116 letters 94–5
Bancroft, Richard 49 BS ISO (999) 44, 48
on Churchill biography index 20, Bunyan, John, fiction 118–19
48, 97 Burton, Richard, biography 69, 77,
Barlow, Caroline 7 86, 96
Barnes, Julian 12 Bushrui, Suhil, letters 3
Barnett, Paul 4 Byatt, A. S. 63, 73
Barnhardt, Wilton, Gospel 116 novels 114–15
Batchelor, Judy 90 indexes on web 119
Bell, Vanessa, biography 62–3 Possession 13, 93, 119
typography 102 Still life 98, 115, 119
Berlioz, Hector, biography 79–80 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron,
bias 32, 51–9, 93 biography 52–3
in political memoirs 9–10
articles on, listed 59 Campbell, Alastair, diaries 11
biographies Campbell, Barry 107–8
as type of text 1, 5–8 Canning, ‘Clemency’, biography
articles on indexing, listed 7–8 index (Maclagan) 46, 78
see also names of subjects glosses 39
Blanchard, Joel 25 prefatory note 96
bold type 33, 80, 86–7, 88, 96, 99, subheadings 62, 69, 77
103 terminology 51
in Augustine biography 103 Wheatley Medal awarded 19–20
Brackney 104 Carey, Gordon
Bonanno, Joseph, autobiography 52 on indexing memoirs 8
Boswell, James on main character’s entry 75–6, 78
biography 78 on subheadings 2, 45, 66, 72–3
London Journal 64 Carlyle, Thomas, biography 80
see also under Johnson, Samuel Carr, J. L., novels 119
130
Index
Carroll, Lewis computers 45, 60, 62, 92

Sylvie and Bruno 116–17 databases 2, 21
Catalogue & Index 19 Gladstone diaries 21
censorious indexes 52, 53 ill effects of use 24
chain indexing 65 Connolly, Cyril, biography 81–2
Chapman, R. W. consistency 36, 49, 66
index to Johnson’s letters 14–15, 25 inconsistency 40–1
chapters 2, 31, 32, 45 continuity 2, 77, 97–8
fiction 115 letters 12–13
headings 77 Coogan, Steve 118
synopses 25, 109, 110 Cook, Margaret, memoirs 53
characters Cooper, Roger, autobiography 3
fictional 88, 113 Cousins, Garry 23
secondary 77 coverage 33–4
see also main character Craine, Ian 91, 99, 106
chronological arrangement of Cramer, Richard Ben 9
subheadings 61, 63–5, 92 credit / acknowledgement to indexers
setting 97, 98 25, 26, 37, 79
Churchill, Winston S. lacking 24, 26, 63, 80, 82, 115
autobiography 77–8 cross-references 35–6, 41
biography in index structure 79
index (Knight) 20, 85, 89 Women of ideas 57
glosses 39–40 for works 85–6
language 48 cumulative effects 93
names 35, 36 cumulative indexes
prefatory note 97 awards 18
subheadings 70 letters 14, 15, 16–17, 48
typography 99–100 Defoe canon 85, 112–13
works 85 fiction 109, 113, 119
Churchill and Fisher (Gough) 23 T. E. Lawrence 13
classification 65, 85, 92
Cleveland, D. B. and Cleveland, Ana Dalyell, Tam, autobiography 107
45 Dancing with empty pockets (Moore)
closing page references 31–2, 98 108
Collison, Robert 112 dates 4, 65
collocation 65, 85, 92 as glosses 38, 40
comic indexes 116, 118 name changes 13, 37
Commynes, Philippe de, Mémoires 25 subdivision into 65
131
de Beer, E. S. 17, 25, 86 Drabble, Margaret 36

on Boswell indexes 17, 40, 48, 73, Dunlop, Judy 23
100
index to Evelyn’s diaries 12, 16, echoing 93
17, 25 Edel, Leon 113
de Botton, Alain 1, 107 Eden, Anthony, biography index
Kiss and tell 118 names 37
Death plus ten years (Cooper) 3 prefatory note 37, 68–9, 97
Defoe, Daniel subheadings 69, 70
canon 85, 112–13 editorial notes 7, 13, 29, 113
novels 112–13 Eliot, T. S., biographies 70–1
Memoirs of a cavalier Ellis, Andrew 110
117 Ellmann, Lucy, Sweet desserts 116
derived-term indexing 45 errors 40–1
design see layout; typography euphemism 54
diaries 9–12 evaluation of indexes
Alanbrooke’s 26 criteria 32, 44, 56
Evelyn’s 12, 16, 17, 25 for history indexes 4
Gladstone’s 12, 21, 76 for subheadings 46–7
glosses 11, 77 for Wheatley Medal 18–19
hotel proprietor’s 54 articles on, listed 27–8
Pym’s 11, 77 Evelyn, John
articles on indexing, listed 12 diaries 12, 16, 17, 25
see also under Pepys, Samuel Letterbooks 15–16
Dickens, Charles
biography index (Matthews) family history 4, 106
24–5 Marris 38
Mandarin edition 24 articles on, listed 5
subheadings 68, 70, 73 feminism 51, 56–7
setting 99 fiction 109–19
letters, indexes to characters in 88, 113
Matthews 24 indexes on web 119
Thornton 14, 49, 91, 93 novels published with indexes
novels 110 115–19
Great expectations 111–12 sequences 110, 114, 116
documentary texts 1–3, 18, 24, 46, 16th cent. 111
60 articles on indexing, listed 119–20
Dogen’s Extensive Record 104 see also Byatt, A. S.
132
Index
Fiction and indexes (SI, 2002) 115–16, Wilson Award 21–2, 48

117 Gray, Alasdair, Lanark 118
Fielding, Henry, novels 110, 119 Greer, Germaine 108
Fiennes, Ranulph, novels 117
Fisk, Neil 60, 66 H. W. Wilson Company / American
Fitzgerald, Penelope 63 Society of Indexers Award for
Flaubert, Gustave Excellence in Book Indexing
correspondence 12 (later American Society of
Madame Bovary 113 Indexers / H. W. Wilson
footnotes 104 Company Award) winners
Ford, Jill 19 1998 21–2, 30, 48
foreign languages 43 2001 and 2002 15
2011 104
Gaarder, Jostein, Sophie’s world 116 Haldane, Richard Burdon,
Gellhorn, Martha, biography 108 autobiography 66, 72–3
genealogy see family history Halliburton, Rachel 112
Gephart, Ronald M. 15 Hamilton, Geoffrey 18–19
Gifford, Paul 106 Hardy, Thomas 74
Gissing, George 117 biography 27
Gladstone, William Ewart Far from the madding crowd 56
biography 26, 71 Hartley, L. P., novels 110
diaries 12, 21, 76 headings see main headings;
Glendinning, Victoria subheadings; sub-subheadings
Anthony Trollope 88 Heiss, Anita 106
reviewer 108 Hensher, Philip 5–6, 53
glosses 35, 38, 44, 55–6 The fit 113
Canning index 39 Herbert, A. P. 116
Churchill index 39–40 Heumann, Karl 10
dates 4, 65 Hill, George Birkbeck 25, 100
diaries 11, 77 history 4, 20, 35, 44
Eden index 37 alternative 118
Goldsmith, Olivia, Bestseller 116 dates 4, 40, 65
Gordon, Giles 7 subheadings 4, 44, 46, 61, 64
Gordon, Michael 61 war 3, 26, 118
Gosse, Edmund, biography 76 articles on indexing, listed 5
Gottlieb, Laura Moss 15, 48 see also Canning, ‘Clemency’;
career 22 family history
on reading text 30 Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf 53
133
Holmstrom, Edwin 61–2 ‘Indexing masterpieces’ 17

hotel proprietor’s diary 54 website 8, 28, 43, 50
Howard, John, autobiography 9, indexers
22–3, 76 authors as 8, 20, 63
Hunnisett, R. F. credit / acknowledgement to 25,
Indexing for editors 43, 93–4 26, 37, 79
Hunting Smith, Warren 14 lacking 24, 26, 63, 80, 82,
115
illustrations 29, 33 in fiction 113
typography 88, 96, 99, 103 sense of intrusion 3, 13
Wellisch on 33 information
Imholtz, August A. 117 compared with knowledge 1–2
impartiality see bias databases 2, 21
inconsistency 40–1 Internet 39, 40
indented style 97, 99 see also websites
Carlyle biography 80 interpretation 1, 32, 45, 47, 51
Connolly biography 81–2 fiction 111, 114–15
Dickens biography 73 Pepys 47
Pepys diary 101–2 introductory notes see prefatory notes
indexees 9–10, 107–8 intrusion, indexer’s sense of 3, 13
Indexer, The Irwin, Robert 112
articles listed ISC/SCI Ewart-Daveluy Award for
on aspect and aboutness 50 Indexing Excellence 15–16, 23
on autobiography indexing 10 Ismay, Hastings Lionel, 1st Baron,
on bias 59 memoirs 2, 75
on biography indexing 7–8 italics 33, 79, 88, 96, 99
on design and layout 104–5 in Augustine biography 103
on diary indexing 12 in V. Bell biography 102
on evaluation of indexes 27–8 in Defoe canon 85
on fiction indexing 119–20 in Johnson biography 100
on history indexing 5
on language 49–59 James, Clive
on letters indexing 16 Brilliant creatures 117
on main character 84 Johnson, Samuel
on names indexing 42 biographies
on strings 95 (Boswell)
on users 108 index (Birkbeck Hill) 25,
‘Indexes Reviewed’ 26 100
134
Index
index (Powell) 17, 25, 48, on language 44, 48

100 on subheadings arrangement 61
glosses 40 see also Pepys, Samuel / diary
subheadings 71, 73 Lawrence, T. E.
typography 100 biography 7
(Martin) 45, 87–8, 94 letters 13
letters 14–15, 25 layout 96–104
aesthetics 93–4
Keane, Molly, novels 119 Carlyle biography 80
Keats, John, biography 71 Connolly biography 81–2
Kessel, Shirley 26 run-on 97–8
Keynes, John Maynard, biography articles on, listed 104–5
26, 71 see also indented style
Kingdom, Ann 117 Leacock, Stephen 65
Knight, G. Norman Lee, David
on Canning index 19 on peerage 41
on Dickens’ letters index 14, 96 on Wheatley Medal 19
on main character entry 76, 77, 78 Lee, Jennifer 107
on subheadings arrangement 64, letter-by-letter alphabetization 60
97–8 letters 13
see also Churchill, Winston S. / indexing collections 12–16
biography awards won for 15–16, 18, 48
knowledge 1–2 articles on, listed 16
Koestler, Arthur, biography 27, 71 intrusion, indexer’s sense of 3, 13
minor mentions in 94–5
Lancaster, F. W. 111 quoted in biographies 13–14, 89
language 44, 48–59 see also under Dickens, Charles;
assigned-term 45 Johnson, Samuel
impartiality 51–4 Levi, Primo, biography 26
limitation 55–9 Levin, Bernard
literary 1, 93, 110, 115 complains of index 62, 66
narrative 48–9 on Pepys index 101
subheadings 46–9 libel 3, 54
articles on, listed 49–50 Lister, Michael 107
Laslett, Peter 17 literary criticism 111–12
Latham, Robert literary language 1, 93, 110, 115
career 20–1 Lively, Penelope 55
on index to Evelyn’s diary 17 local history 4
135
Lurie, Alison, novels 114 on narrative 31

Lyons, John 58 on subheadings arrangement 66–7,
68
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron on Wheatley Medal 18
Macaulay 9 see also under Dickens, Charles
Mackey, Margaret, autobiography 23 Maugham, Somerset, biography 26
Maclagan, Michael 19–20 McClellan, Audrey 23–4
see also Canning, ‘Clemency’, McSmith, Andy 107
biography Mello, Michael
main character 6, 61–2, 75–83 Dead wrong 21–2, 48
of autobiographies 8, 23 memoirs see autobiographies
minimalistic indexing 76, 77 mentions, minor see minor mentions
omitting from index 23, 75–7 metatopic 75, 78–9
paragraphed subheadings for see also main character
69–73, 79–83, 98, 99 Michelangelo, biography 26, 72
Bach 87 minor mentions 29, 35, 90–5
V. Bell 62 diaries 11, 13
Dickens 68, 70, 73, 86, 99 family history 4, 106
Johnson 87–8 letters 13, 94–5
Pepys 64, 65, 72, 100–1 strings 18–19, 90–5
typography 88, 101, 102, 103 typography 91, 103
articles on indexing, listed 84 articles on, listed 95
main headings 44, 46 see also passim, use of
arrangement 60, 66–7 Mirabile, Lisa 119
Major, John, autobiography 9 Morine, Suzanne 119
Mansfield, Katherine, biography 71 multiple indexes 14–15, 116
maps 29, 34, 99 Murdoch, Iris, novels 119
Marr, Andrew 53 Murphy, Tom 29, 112
Marris, G. Philip 38 website 119
Matthew, Colin 21, 76
Matthews, Douglas 1, 30, 35, 41 Nabokov, Vladimir, biography 82–3,
on and 49 86
career 24–5 names 35–43
on impartiality 53 changed 35–6, 37
indexes by 26, 45, 68, 85, 86 fictional 88
Defoe canon 112–13 foreign 43
on indexing fiction 109 hyphenated 36
on indexing letters 13, 14 incomplete 38–9, 56
136
Index
peerage 41 of page numbers 93

pseudonyms 41–2 setting 98–9, 102
shared 38 paragraphs, text 31–2, 114
variant spelling 43 partiality see bias
articles on indexing, listed 42 passim, use of 91
narrative entries in Churchill autobiography 78
examples 64 in diaries 11
narrative form 1, 2–3, 4, 97, 113 typography 104
and letters 13, 15, 89 peerage 41
see also fiction Pepys, Samuel
narrative indexes 46, 58 biography 72
and awards 18, 19–26 diary
style 97–8 Everyman edition 77
narrative indexing 30–1, 44–9, 60–2, Latham/Matthews edition,
64 index 47–8
see also thematic grouping language 48
Newberry, Mary 15–16 names 96
Newman, Cardinal, biography 62 preface 96
Nicolson, Nigel, autobiography 63 subheadings 64
collocation 65
O’Casey, Sean, biography 72 typography 100–1
Olivier, Laurence, autobiography 45 Wheatley Medal awarded
Orwell, George 20, 47
Nineteen eighty-four 59 H. B. Wheatley edition 47, 48
index 117 Phipps, Christopher
on main character 78
page-order arrangement of on D. Matthews 24–5
subheadings 60, 61–3 on minor mentions 94
Pamuk, Orhan on subheadings 45, 68
A strangeness in my mind 118 on Tristram Shandy index 118
paragraphed subheadings Piggott, Mary
meaningfully 47–8, 61, 62–3, 68, on history indexes 4
77, 98 on Canning index 18–19, 51, 78
examples 69–73, 79–83, 98, 99 on typography 103
sub-subheadings 98 on Wheatley Medal awards 18
visually 97–8 political memoirs 9–10
paragraphs, index 47, 61, 62–3, 68, Howard’s 9, 22–3, 76
72–3 political terms 56
137
politicians 9–10, 107–8 Richardson, Samuel, novels 116

Pottle, F. A. 64 Ridehalgh, Nan 100
Powell, L. F. see under Johnson, Roy, Kenneth 107
Samuel / biography run-on style 97–8
prefatory / preliminary notes 36, 37, Russell, Bertrand, biography 72
96–7
Bach biography 87 Sapir, Edward 58
Churchill biography 89 Sassen, Catherine 25
Dickens’ letters 49, 91 scientific texts 18, 60, 66
Eden biography 37, 68–9 Scott, Walter, novels 114, 119
Memoirs of Lord Ismay 75 sensitive content 3–4, 13
prelims 29 sequences 2
prepositions 48, 64, 97 fiction 110, 114, 116
presentation 96–105 letters 12
setting 97–9 Sewell, Brian 7
Priest, Leigh 86–7 Shaftesley, John 93–4
Proust, Marcel, novels 110, 116 Shaw, George Bernard, biography 72
pseudonyms 41–2 Shuttleworth, Christine 88
Pym, Barbara significance 4, 29, 36, 93, 98
diary 11, 77 determining 1, 30, 32
novels 119 in fiction 114
indicating 92
questions Simkin, John 6
indexers’ 32 Singer, Peter 58–9
readers’ 23, 47 Sitwell, Sir Osbert, autobiography 66
small capitals 68, 101, 103
Raphael, Frederic, autobiography 107 in Augustine biography 103
Raven, Anthony Smith, Paul H. 15
index by 117 Snicket, Lemony 116
on indexing fiction 110–11 Sobel, Robert
readers see users For want of a nail 118
reading the text 29–33 Society of Indexers
Reagan, Ronald, biography 52 conferences 6, 13, 106
Redwood, John 9 Fiction and indexes 115–16, 117
research see also Indexer, The; Wheatley
by indexers 35, 39–40 Medal
by readers 4, 36, 42, 94, 106, 110 ‘soft’ texts 1–4, 21, 60, 109
reviewers 106, 108 language 44, 48
138
Index
specialisms 6–7 setting

Spectator, The 9 indented 97, 99
spelling 40 run-on 97–8
variant 43, 114 terminology 44–9, 55, 66–7
Spender, Dale 56–7 impartiality 51–4
Women of ideas 57 thesauri 58
Stalin, biography 23, 72 written works 86–7
names 42 see also paragraphed subheadings
standardization 58–9, 100 subject specialism 6–7
editions of works 114 sub-subheadings 68, 70, 73
Standards 44, 48, 60, 106 in Austen biography 89
Stauber, Do Mi in Carlyle biography 80
on metatopic 78–9 in Connolly biography 81–2
on Wilson Award winner 21–2 in Pepys diary 101
Stern, Simon 111 in run–on layout 98
Sterne, Laurence Surtees, Robert Smith, novels
Tristram Shandy 118 112
strings 18–19, 90–5 Sutherland, John 113
articles on, listed 95 symbols 60, 96
see also minor mentions in fiction 110, 114
subheadings 2, 30, 32, 76–7, 79, 90, typographic 104
91
in Arnold letters 15 teaching, indexing as 29, 112
arrangement 32, 60–7 terminology 1, 44–50
alphabetical 60, 63, 66–7, assigned 45
78 derived 45
chronological 61, 63–5, 92, impartiality 51–4
97–8 Thatcher, Margaret, biography 7
page-order 60, 61–3 thematic grouping of subheadings 61,
thematic 68–74 68–73, 112–13
in award-winning indexes, study themes 2, 6, 32, 68, 93, 110
24, 44, 46, 97–8 echoing 93
blocks 65 in fiction 114
bracketed 91–2, 98 extended by index 113
in fiction 115 in letters 13, 14
in histories 4, 44, 46, 61, 64 tracing 73–4, 79
letters 89 thesauri 58
and minor mentions 90–4 Thirkell, Angela, novels 110, 119
139
Thornton, James 14–15, 25 Vickers, John 38

index to Dickens’ letters 14, 49,
91, 93 Wace, Michael 18
on minor mentions 93 Walker, Alan 9
Times, The 55–6, 62 ANZI Medal 22–3, 76
Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 14, Walpole, Horace
112 biography 76
Tolkien, J. R. R., novels 116 letters 14
Toole, Wendy 90 ‘Washington read’ 9–10, 107
topic (aboutness) 58, 114 websites
articles on, listed 50 BookBrowse 117
Towery, Margie fiction indexes on 119
on metatopic 75 The Indexer’s 8, 28, 43, 50
Wilson Award winner 15, 48 Murphy’s 119
Training in Indexing 25 Weinberg, Bella Hass
Trevor-Roper, Hugh 45 on aboutness and aspect 58,
Trollope, Anthony, biography 88 114
Trump, Donald, biography 52 on strings 18
typography 14, 96, 99–104 on subheadings arrangement
aesthetics 93–4 65
Augustine biography 103 Wellisch, Hans H.
Brackney 91, 103–4 on indexing illustrations 33
Churchill biography 99–100 on narrative indexing 2, 49
for fictional characters 88, 113 on Pepys index 20
for illustrations 33 on subheadings order 62
for works 86–8 West, G. D. 79
articles on, listed 104–5 Wheatley, H. B. 47, 48
Wheatley Medal
Uglow, Jenny 63 awarded 12, 18–21
Updike, John, The centaur 116 Commendation 24
users 88, 93, 96, 106–8 criteria 18–19
political 9–10, 107–8 1962 19–20, 62, 77
questions 23, 47 1967 20, 93
researchers 4, 36, 42, 94, 106, 110 1983 20–1, 47–8
articles on, listed 108 1994 21, 76
Whittemore, Reed 7, 106
Valèry, Paul, biography 106 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 58
Van Gogh, biography 7 Wilde, Oscar, biography 7
140
Index
Williams’ Obstetrics 51 word-by-word alphabetization

Wilson, Angus, biography 36 60
Wilson, David 110 works, written, listing 85–8, 96
Wilson, Jeremy 13 Bach 87
Wittman, Cecelia 2 Britten 69, 77
subheadings study 24, 44, 46, Connolly 81
97–8 Dickens 86
women Johnson 87–8
feminism 51, 56–7 Nabokov 83, 86
glosses 55–6 Pepys 96
names 56 Wyman, L. Pilar 15
Woolf, Virginia 6, 8
biography 27, 83 Yeltsin, Boris, biography 26
Orlando 113, 117
141

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Indexing Biographies

and Other Stories of Human Lives

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PR ESS

Th is fourth edition published 2020 by

Copyright © 2020 Hazel K. Bell

The right of Hazel K. Bell to be identified as the author of this

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

ISBN 978-1-78962-162-4 (limp)

1. Narrative texts and stories of lives 1

2. The great and good 17

3. First read your book 29

5. Coming to terms: subheadings 44

6. The perils of partiality 51

7. All in order: a proper arrangement 60

9. Mighty main characters 75

10. The works 85

11. Just mentioning … 90

12. Presentation and layout 96

13. The user 106

14. Fiction 109

We acknowledge with thanks permission granted by all the authors

discovery of information. The latter is readily stored, not only in

The narrative form

Articles on the indexing of narrative history that have appeared in

the general characteristics, of recurrent themes, of the bare truth

However, subject specialisms of several sorts may yet come to be

Articles on the general indexing of biographies that have appeared

Indexing biographies: lives do bring their problems. Hazel K. Bell.

A list of literary figures featured in The Indexer can be found in

Articles on the indexing of autobiographies that have appeared in

seem to offer indexers less opportunity for the devising of meaningful

Much praise has been accorded to the indexes to E. S. de Beer’s

Articles on the indexing of diaries that have appeared in The Indexer

relationships described in the biography; and sources drawn on and

Indexes to volumes of letters have received high praise. The

indexes as a means of conveying to the reader a good deal of

1,150-page, Letterbooks of John Evelyn, edited by Douglas D. C. Chambers

Articles on indexing letters that have appeared in The Indexer are:

For the indexing of fiction, see chapter 14.

We could look to the masterpieces of the indexing of life stories for

six undifferentiated references the index is almost certainly not

Oxford 1970–1. Mary Piggott attributed his success as an indexer to his

University of Toronto, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge,

narrative and made it accessible to the reader in a coherent

The index is remarkable for an index to an autobiography in

Other good ’uns

Douglas Matthews must easily win the competition for that

Narrative indexes sometimes appear in the ‘Indexes praised’ section

Articles about the evaluation of indexes that have appeared in The

The unconventional index and its merits. William S. Heckscher. 13(1),

Faced thus with little-known subject-matter, the indexer of life-stories

of entries (remembering though that subheadings, expressed in words,

Analysis and annotation

perhaps an open-pagination reference maintained for them, and we

Minor references to characters, or those making a single appearance in the

and identifiable when reached, as the person originally perhaps sought

A thoroughly punctilious index in the matter of name changes and

John Brown, meet John Brown

Who are all these people?

Indexing biographies: lives do bring their problems. Hazel K. Bell.

Much praise has been accorded to the indexes to E. S. de Beer’s

1,150-page, Letterbooks of John Evelyn, edited by Douglas D. C. Chambers

The unconventional index and its merits. William S. Heckscher. 13(1),

Byron, Annabella, née Milbanke, wife of B. […] vicissitudes of her

A life of Gerald Brenan: the interior castle by J. Gathorne-Hardy; Sinclair-

Winston S. Churchill […] vol. 2, Young statesman, 1901–1919 by

of Winston S. Churchill’s My Early Life (Hamlyn, 1930). His entry, more

The Ah!-factor. Hazel K. Bell. 17(3), 191–2